Review of ‘Gods and Robots’ by Adrienne Mayor
Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Princeton University Press, pp. 304, $29.95 (hbk) ISBN 9780691183510
We are currently living in an age not only marked by the pervasiveness of high-technology and information dissemination but by their exponential development and deployment defying global borders. This fourth industrial revolution brings with it a host of powerful technologies, and, for most people what comes to mind when thinking about the future of technology as a function of current trends in the power and imagination of artificial intelligence and robotics. Most would argue that modernity is characterized by these technologies, something that would appear as immanently magical to our progenitors and perhaps even unthinkable as conceptual entities. The term robot itself can be traced back to Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R: Rossum’s Universal Robots. But the term robot and underlying concept of created, fabricated, or technical life extend far beyond the term’s 100-year history. This is the thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in her timely volume Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.
As a philosopher of technology, a historical understanding of underlying concepts that are often considered critical to modernity is not insignificant. Rendering these concepts into high-resolution by tracing their genealogy allows us to track the evolutions of certain traditions of thought and highlight loci for potentially fruitful, but alternative avenues to pursue. Similarly, the threads that Mayor weaves in order to parallel many of our modern understandings of automata and technology with ancient imaginaries are remarkably prescient given their similarity and their likewise similar lack of definitive answers. Her introductory chapter recounts the story of Talos, the bronze automata from Apollonius’s Argonautica explored, even in the third century BCE, if Talos was immortal or sentient. Although remaining unanswered, we can already draw connections between this more than two-thousand-year-old story and how we today ask similar questions on both technological immortality and machine consciousness.
What makes this particular work stunning is Mayor’s craftiness in weaving together historical narratives of often disperse cultures across time. Her ability to stitch Greco-Roman, Chinese, and Mesopotamian mythologies (to name a few) into a single chapter while maintaining poetic coherence is breathtaking and comparable to only Joseph Campbell’s magnum opus The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Barring that complexity, the difficulty in making strong parallels with modern technologies, innovations, and practices seems to be tackled with breathless ease that one may take her work as a magical innovation, similar to the beguilings of Medea herself. One would think that in such an exposition Mayor’s default character would be that of this journal’s namesake, Prometheus himself as the fire bringer and the forefather of human inventions. And to an extent this is the case, Prometheus does make numerous appearances throughout, but despite each of the chapters’ emphasis on different stores like those of Jason, Medea, Pygmalion, Hephaestus, and Pandora, among others, the underlying figure who seems to be Mayor’s kindred spirit here is Daedalus. Architect and craftsman of the Labyrinth which housed the Minotaur as well as the technology of flight that he gave his son Icarus the ability of artificial flight, Mayor is keen on humanizing Daedalus by drawing on many of the examples of ancient texts which are clear that he was in fact mortal. Rendering many of his seemingly godlike inventions, or daedala, firmly man-made.
The simplicity of her prose is no doubt helped by the lack of in-text citations, a stylistic choice that matches perfectly with the constant dance between mythic geographies. This point is buttressed by the fourteen colored plates and seventy-five figures in what is no more than a 218-page book. One would think that having so many threads to pull on, both ancient and modern, interrupted with so many images would make for difficult reading similar to switching between multiple TV channels whenever commercials come on. One would be wrong.
One would be mistaken to construe Gods and Robots as a naïve or half-hearted anachronistic attempt at mapping modern understandings of innovation onto ancient stories. Mayor’s endeavor is anything but. What she attempts to do, and in my view quite successfully, is extricate our contemporary understanding of innovation as something uniquely modern and rather show that we are in fact homo faber and that such dreams of high-technology are inextricably human, and thus ancient.
