Replicants and robots: what can the ancient Greeks teach us? – Adrienne Mayor Aeon Essays

The question of what it meant to be human obsessed the ancient Greeks. The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god Hephaestus, and the tragically inquisitive Pandora all raised the basic question of the boundaries between human and machine. Today, developments in biotechnology and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) bring a new urgency to questions about the implications of combining the biological and the technological. It's a discussion that we might say the ancient Greeks began. Medea, the mythic sorceress whose name means'to devise', knew many arcane arts. These included secrets of rejuvenation. To demonstrate her powers, Medea first appeared to Jason and the Argonauts as a stooped old woman, only to transform herself into a beautiful young princess. Jason fell under her spell and became her lover. He asked Medea to restore the youthful vigour of his aged father, Aeson.