Ancient myths reveal early fantasies about artificial life

Thousands of years before machine learning and self-driving cars became reality, the tales of giant bronze robot Talos, artificial woman Pandora and their creator god, Hephaestus, filled the imaginations of people in ancient Greece. A Greek vase painting, dating to about 450 B.C., depicts the death of Talos. Stanford's Adrienne Mayor examined the myth of Talos and others in her latest research. Historians usually trace the idea of automata to the Middle Ages, when the first self-moving devices were invented, but the concept of artificial, lifelike creatures dates to the myths and legends from at least about 2,700 years ago, said Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in the Department of Classics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. These ancient myths are the subject of Mayor's latest book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.