very excited to find this in the london library – a book exploring the anticipations of robots and ai in ancient mythology and literature, especially greek

i’d always thought hephaestus’ robot servants were amazing

Anyway, the book told me loads of myths I hadn’t heard of, like how Medea and Jason disposed of Talus, the great robot who defended Crete for Minos; after a load of myths mayor then intelligently discusses parallels and differences between these ancient archetypes and contemporary developments in ai and robotics

She’s interesting on the distinction between monsters which were born, and those which were made: it seems that this developed after the earliest tales – presumably as the skill of engineers made fictional artificial monsters more conceivable