Was Talos, the Bronze Automaton Who Guarded the Island of Crete in Greek Myth, an Early Example of Artificial Intelligence?
The mythical sentry was depicted as thinking like a human and showing some human-like tendencies
“May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?”
This was the question posed by Alan Turing in a 1950 essay titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In his paper, the British mathematician outlined a method, now called the “Turing Test,” of determining whether a computer is capable of thinking like a human.
Turing, who is often credited as a founding father of artificial intelligence, wasn’t the first to conceive of machines achieving human-like intelligence. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein famously grapples with the ethical ramifications of artificially creating life, while Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., which first hit the stage in 1921, coined the term “robot” to describe the humanoid beings that dramatically take over the world in his science fiction work.
But the ancient Greeks beat all of these individuals to the punch by more than 2,000 years. As Adrienne Mayor, a classicist at Stanford University, argues in her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology, “Long before the clockwork contraptions of the Middle Ages and the [automatons] of early modern Europe … ideas about making artificial life—and qualms about replicating nature—were explored in Greek myths.”
One such ancient story centers on the bronze sentry Talos. Forged by Hephaestus, the Greek god of smiths and artisans, Talos was said to have guarded the island of Crete, off the coast of Greece. He patrolled the beaches three times a day, throwing boulders at enemy ships to ward off unwanted visitors to King Minos’ domain.
The Argonautica, an epic poem written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century B.C.E., chronicles the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, including their encounter with Talos. After retrieving the legendary golden fleece, the heroes attempt to land on Crete’s shores but find themselves blocked by Talos. Jason’s lover, the sorceress Medea, starts singing, invoking “the death spirits, devourers of life, the swift hounds of Hades,” according to a 20th-century translation of the Argonautica. She then directs “her hostile glance” toward Talos, bewitching him into grazing his ankle, which holds his only vulnerability.
“Talos for a while stood on his tireless feet, swaying to and fro, then at last, all strengthless, fell with a mighty thud,” the translation states. In some ways, this interaction might seem like a typical anecdote of an ancient hero and heroine meeting a divinely created obstacle and outsmarting their enemy. Entities magically endowed with life by the gods are not a rarity in Greek myth. Consider, for example, Galatea, a statue of a woman sculpted by Pygmalion as art, then brought to life by Aphrodite.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c0/69/c06972f5-ae4d-4c69-adca-f67ba28a0cc2/gettyimages-99285908_8.jpg)
Unlike Galatea, whose “realism became reality supernaturally,” Talos was not merely created “by magic spells or divine fiat,” writes Mayor. He was said to be engineered by Hephaestus, or rather “made, not born,” in a process the ancients “might have called biotechne, from bios ‘life’ and techne, ‘crafted through art or science.’”
Talos was depicted in myth as a machine programmed to act human though never capable of achieving regular human life—what one might call a robot today.
“There are many definitions of a robot, but a commonly accepted one is that a robot can move on its own, interact with its environment, and has some sort of inner workings and power source,” Mayor tells Smithsonian magazine. “Talos has all of those things.”
The Argonautica describes Talos’ internal computational system in depth, outlining some of the wiring necessary to build a machine of this kind. “Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable,” the translation notes, “but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein, and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.”
This “vein,” perhaps better visualized as a tube, transported ichor, the ethereal liquid that flowed through the bodies of the ancient Greek gods. A nail or a bolt held the system together at Talos’ ankle. In a sense, this ichor functioned like a power source or electricity, circulating through the robot’s bronze limbs and fueling his movements and actions. If Talos’ internal engineering was in any way disturbed, he would malfunction.
Some scholars interpret Talos’ creation differently. In Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination, historian Minsoo Kang writes that Talos was viewed as “not a mechanical being but very much a living creature” who simply looked like a modern machine.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/54/4954f4c6-8220-4646-8577-a96e89f4d95b/1692px-comparable_to_the_group_of_polygnotos_arv_extra_-_death_of_talos_-_draped_youths_02.jpg)
In Mayor’s view, this statement oversimplifies Talos’ clearly engineered nature. “What living creature has a metallic body and a nonblood circulatory system sealed with a bolt?” she asks in her book.
“Talos, like modern ideas of cyborgs, … was envisioned as a hybrid of living and nonliving parts,” Mayor writes. “Through myths like that of Talos, ancients could contemplate whether an entity ‘made, not born’ was simply a mindless machine or an autonomous, sentient intelligence.”
In Mayor’s view, Talos is both a robot and an automaton, a machine designed to resemble or mimic a human. As Gregory Nagy, a scholar of Greek literature at Harvard University, tells Smithsonian, the root of the word “automaton” is mat, which shares “a common origin with words like the Latin mens, mentis, meaning ‘mind.’” Paired with “auto,” which means self, “‘automaton’ essentially means ‘self-mind,’ or something that has a mind of its own,” Nagy says.
Examples of automatons in ancient Greek myth abound. Homer’s Iliad describes similarly advanced devices crafted by Hephaestus, including gold tripods that moved of their own volition and “female forms … that moved and breathed in animated gold,” anticipating the gods’ needs and responding accordingly. Daedalus, the inventor who designed Minos’ Labyrinth as a prison for the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, was said to have developed animated statues that rivaled Hephaestus’ mechanical servants.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/13/13/131355a3-123c-4bba-910c-d1731a6ee2e1/806128.jpg)
What differentiates Talos from other legendary automatons, says Mayor, is the fact that he was the first such mythical being sent to earth to interact with humans. Unlike Hephaestus’ self-moving tripods and golden women, which served the Olympian gods, Talos was exposed to humans for an extended period of time, and this seemingly led him to adopt some of their traits.
Because Hephaestus “programmed” Talos to merely guard Crete, “he’s not supposed to have human qualities,” Mayor says. But some older accounts of the Talos story suggest “that he might possess some human-like emotions or qualities.”
Mayor points to Medea’s strategy when fighting Talos as evidence of these traits. In the “more complex descriptions of his downfall,” she writes, Medea first tries to hypnotize Talos. The sorceress then attempts to persuade him by exploiting his fear of death. Finally, Medea promises the automaton that if he lets her remove the bolt at his ankle, he will become immortal. Not only does Medea use two tools that should work only on humans—hypnotization and persuasion—but she also preys on Talos’ fear of death, a fear that usually only exists among the living.
“This is not what the maker, or the person who deployed this bronze automaton, had expected,” Mayor told the American Enterprise Institute’s “AEIdeas” blog in 2019. “They didn’t expect [Talos] to develop his own desires and make decisions on his own.”
Talos’ potential humanity is echoed in the word choice that describes his circulatory system. Instead of using the simple word for “pipe,” Apollonius specifically uses the term “vein” in describing how Talos’ ichor is transported around his metallic body, Nagy says.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/5a/2a/5a2a019c-f408-4a51-a247-5643369204bf/niobid_painter_arv_601_23_creation_of_pandora_-_chorus_of_women_-_pans_-_satyrs_and_maenad_01.jpg)
Like Talos, Pandora, an artificial woman in Greek myth who had been manufactured from earthly materials by Hephaestus, was “made, not born.” Sent to earth to punish humankind for accepting the gift of fire from the Titan Prometheus, Pandora had a single mission, Mayor says: “to be accepted into human society and then open [a] jar full of miseries.” While Talos’ time among humans influenced his way of thinking, Pandora never adapted to her environment or pursued a course of action unrelated to her purpose. In this way, Mayor argues, Pandora is akin to an A.I. agent created solely for infiltration and disruption.
“The thing about myth,” says Nagy, “is that it is good for humans to think with.” In other words, myth provides a literary framework through which people can explore and make sense of their own era’s challenges. Millennia before Turing posed the question “Can machines think?” Talos, Pandora and other artificially intelligent entities had already set the stage for humans to explore this idea.
“Talos, despite being crafted with divine ingenuity, has vulnerabilities—his ankle, sealed with a bolt, is his industrial weak spot, and even his humanoid characteristics can be manipulated,” Mayor says. Alluding to present-day debates over the reach of A.I., she adds, “Medea exploits these flaws, showing that no matter how advanced a creation is, there will always be some hacker who can find and exploit its weaknesses.”