From Myth to Machine: Ancient Tale of Talos Foreshadowed Artificial Intelligence

08:53 2/5/2025 - Πηγή: iEfimerida

Long before Alan Turing posed his famous question about whether machines could think, the ancient Greeks envisioned artificial beings that mirrored modern ideas of robots and AI.

Central to this ancient vision was Talos, a bronze guardian said to patrol the shores of Crete, hurling boulders to repel intruders.

Talos appears in Greek

mythology as a towering automaton forged by Hephaestus, the god of fire and craftsmanship. Described in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Talos was programmed—rather than born—to defend the island kingdom of King Minos.

This mechanical sentinel circled Crete’s coastline three times a day and possessed a single, fatal vulnerability: a vein in his ankle, sealed by a bolt, through which the divine fluid ichor flowed.

Scholars argue that the myth of Talos represents one of the earliest conceptualizations of artificial intelligence.

“What living creature has a metal body and a circulatory system sealed with a bolt?” asks Adrienne Mayor, a Stanford University classicist and author of Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology.

“Talos was designed as a hybrid machine of animate and inanimate parts,” she writes.

The tale also foreshadows modern anxieties surrounding AI.

When the Argonauts attempted to land on Crete, Medea, the sorceress companion of Jason, neutralized Talos by exploiting his singular weakness.

She hypnotized him, appealed to his fear of death, and convinced him to remove the bolt from his ankle in exchange for immortality. Talos then collapsed, drained of his life-like energy.

“That Medea used persuasion and hypnosis—tools that only affect sentient beings—hints that Talos had some level of self-awareness,” Ms. Mayor suggests.

“Despite being made, not born, he developed quasi-human fears and responses.”

This theme is not isolated. Greek mythology offers several examples of artificial entities animated by divine or magical forces: Pygmalion’s statue Galatea, brought to life by Aphrodite; the intelligent golden tripods of Hephaestus; and Pandora, crafted from earthly materials to deceive mankind.

Each reflects evolving human concerns about the boundaries between life, artifice, and control.

Alan Turing famously asked in 1950, “Might not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?” Talos, in many ways, predates this question by over two millennia.

The myth’s enduring power, says Ms. Mayor, lies in its continued relevance.

In Talos, the Greeks did not just imagine a machine with human traits; they also imagined what it meant for such a machine to break down.

“No matter how advanced a creation,” she notes, “there will always be a Medea—someone who can find and exploit its flaws.”

As debate over AI’s limits and potential continues in the modern era, Talos stands as a hauntingly prescient symbol of both technological promise and its intrinsic vulnerabilities.

By Konstantinos Tsavalos

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