The question of what it meant to be human obsessed the ancient Greeks. Time and again, their stories explored the promises and perils of staving off death, extending human capabilities, replicating life. 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)
Read the rest of the essay to learn more about:
Medea and Talos, the bronze robot
Jason and the replicant army
Hercules and the regenerating Hydra
Daedalus's living statues
and many more...
Jason and the replicant army
Hercules and the regenerating Hydra
Daedalus's living statues
and many more...
