40 | Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It should probably come as no surprise that these ideas aren’t new to modern society — they go way back, at least to the stories and mythologies of ancient Greece. Today’s guest, Adrienne Mayor, is a folklorist and historian of science, whose recent work has been on robots and artificial humans in ancient mythology. From the bronze warrior Talos to the evil fembot Pandora, mythology is rife with stories of artificial beings. It’s both fun and useful to think about our contemporary concerns in light of these ancient tales. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar Classics and History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University. She is also a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her work has encompasses fossil traditions in classical antiquity and Native America, the origins of biological weapons, and the historical precursors of the stories of Amazon warriors. In 2009 she was a finalist for the National Book Award. Web page at Stanford Amazon author page Wikipedia Google Scholar Video of a talk on Amazons Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and you might remember a couple weeks ago
0:06.0	We did a slight detour from our usual topics. I'm not exactly sure what our usual topics are
0:10.7	But we took a detour back into the ancient world
0:13.3	We talked with ed Watts about the decline of the Roman Republic and of course one of the interesting things about ancient history or history at all
0:20.5	Is its resonances with contemporary history?
0:23.8	So today we're gonna go back to the ancient world. I had a good time in that previous podcast
0:28.4	I hope you did too. So today we're gonna go back but with a slightly different twist
0:32.9	Connecting it to our issues of technology and artificial intelligence
0:37.0	In fact, we're gonna be asking what were robots and AI systems like
0:42.5	2,500 years ago now you might be thinking to yourself
0:45.3	There weren't any robots or artificial intelligences back in ancient Greece and Rome and you're correct
0:50.2	But that didn't stop people from talking about them the mythology the stories the poems of ancient Greece and Rome
0:57.3	Were in some sense similar to the science fiction and fantasy of today
1:01.5	They allowed the authors to let their imaginations roam free and they would often stop at the point where they were talking about
1:09.6	Constructed beings in the shape or manner of humans. So today's guest is Adrian Mayer
1:15.2	Who is a historian of ancient scientists and a classical folklorist at Stanford?
1:19.9	She's very interesting at this because she not only reads the ancient texts but also consults the archeological
1:25.5	Paleontological evidence. So we're gonna talk about all the different appearances in Greek mythology of
1:32.3	robot-like creatures and of course being that with Greek mythology there was always a lesson right?
1:37.9	There was always something went wrong because somebody did something bad and
1:42.3	What it reflects is the fact that the worries or the interesting conundrums that face you when you talk about human-like
1:49.9	Machines were just as relevant
	...

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