Hephaestus, the smith god of invention, fabricated Talos in his heavenly foundry, which was imagined as resembling but far surpassing real bronze foundries on earth—with vastly superior technology, capable of producing “living” and self-moving machines (chapter 7). Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was the hardest, most durable man-made material of the eponymous Bronze Age. In the subsequent Iron Age, arcane bronze and bronze-making technologies retained an aura of the supernatural among ordinary folk. In popular superstition, figures made of bronze were believed to enchant or to ward off evil. Bronze guardian statues were often placed at borders, boundaries, bridges, gates, and harbors.29 The brazen forms of the mythical Talos of Crete and the historical Colossus of Rhodes might have been thought to exert a kind of magic-shield effect, but both were engineered with complex internal structures.
From antiquity into the Middle Ages, bronze was the favored material for making “living machines” and automata. Not only did bronze casting require “trade secrets,” esoteric knowledge and skills, but casting could reproduce human and animal forms in metal with a preternatural verisimilitude. This may have led to early Greek smiths being “perceived as magicians,” notes Sandra Blakely in her history of metallurgy. But, Blakely continues, “to call an artisan a magician may simply be hyperbolic praise of his technical skills,” especially in the case of “artifacts that seem to come alive.” In the lost-wax method of bronze casting, described below, the likeness of a person or animal can seem to appear by magic. As science-fiction futurist Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” By creating an eerie imitation of a living thing, an inventive god—or human inventor—might also “seek to replicate the animation” of that thing.30 In the logic of magical thinking, the bronze object’s uncanny replication of life suggests the notion that the simulacrum might also include self-movement and agency.31
Attributing magic to metallurgy could also reflect technological mastery of natural science extrapolated to metalworking, remarks Blakely. According to ancient Greek legend, the discovery of the art of pouring molten metal into crucibles occurred after a forest fire on a mountain. The “intense heat melted the ores hidden inside the earth,” and as the molten ores flowed down the mountain, they filled cavities on the rocky surface, taking their exact forms.32
Contemplating the descriptions of Talos’s biotechnology—the single vessel running from his head to his feet secured with a seal—and the way that once the seal was opened, the ichor poured out like molten lead, classical scholar A. B. Cook proposed an intriguing theory drawing on ancient metallurgy. Cook suggested that the distinctive physiology of Talos might have symbolized or alluded to lost-wax casting in the Bronze Age. Like other bronze figurines and large bronze statues of antiquity, Talos himself would have been wrought by a lost-wax method.33
A finely detailed early fifth-century BC red-figure cup in Berlin, the Foundry Vase, illustrates artisans creating two lifelike bronze statues using foundry tools and techniques, including the sophisticated lost-wax method. The statue of an athlete is in process, with parts of the body as yet unconnected (fig. 1.9, plate 3; compare figs 6.3–11 for images of Prometheus constructing the first man in sections). On the other side of the vase, we see workers finishing a larger-than-life, realistic statue of a warrior (fig. 1.10).
The ancient lost-wax technology is incompletely known, but one method involved making a rough clay model or a wooden armature, which was coated with beeswax. Then the finer details were carved and molded in the wax by the sculptor. This wax model was covered with a thin clay slip, followed by successively thicker layers to make a mold. The core of the now-formless mass was pierced by a hollow bronze rod, from head to feet. This tube allowed the melting wax to pour out of the feet when the form was placed in a fiery furnace. Molten bronze, with lead added for plasticity and to increase flow, was next poured between the inner and outer molds where the wax had once been, to create the hollow statue. Notably, Talos heated his body by leaping into a fire, according to the poet Simonides, and his ichor flowed out at his feet.34
FIG. 1.9 (PLATE 3). Foundry scene, artisans making a realistic bronze statue of an athlete, in pieces, surrounded by blacksmith tools. Attic red-figure kylix, from Vulci, about 490–480 BC, by the Foundry Painter. Bpk Bildagentur / Photo by Johannes Laurentius / Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.
FIG. 1.10. Foundry scene, workers finishing a statue of a warrior. Attic red-figure kylix, from Vulci, about 490–480 BC, by the Foundry Painter. Bpk Bildagentur / Photo by Johannes Laurentius / Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.
Magic and mysterious biomechanics obviously overlap in the myths about artificial life expressed in folklore terms. But in the various narratives about Talos, it is striking that the physiology of the bronze automaton was described in mytho-technical language, alluding to medical and scientific concepts current in antiquity.35
In the realm of myth, for example, the word ichor was used in a special sense for the “blood” of the gods. But in ancient medical and natural science contexts, ichor denoted the watery, amber-colored blood serum of mammals. Moreover, in the Argonautica, the poet’s word for the vital vein that made up the bronze giant’s circulation system was a technical term for blood vessels in Greek medical treatises. The imaginary integration of living and nonliving components, melding biology with metallurgical “mechanics,” makes Talos into a kind of ancient cyborg with biomechanical body parts.36
Talos, as an android constructed in Hephaestus’s divine foundry and animated by ichor, was presumably intended to be a perpetual-motion machine. In the myth Talos seems to evince inklings of consciousness and an “instinct” for survival, and he acquiesced to Medea’s persuasion, indicating agency and volition. But Talos is unaware of his origins and does not understand his own physiology. And indeed, how should his nature be understood? According to the lost play by Sophocles, Talos was “fated to perish.” And as Medea guessed, Talos was not immortal—even though ichor might have been believed to confer immortality. The myth poses a conundrum: Was Talos a kind of demigod, a “man” encased in bronze, or an animated statue?
In Greek mythology, golden ichor instead of red blood circulated in the veins of gods because they were nourished by ambrosia and nectar, which made them ageless and immortal (see chapters 3 and 4 on attempts to appropriate these divine attributes for humans). Immortal gods and goddesses could receive superficial injuries and lose a few drops of ichor without dying because their bodies quickly regenerated (Homer Iliad 5.364–82; cf. the fate of Prometheus, chapter 3). Even though immortal ichor flowed in Talos, Medea reasoned that if she could cause his total exsanguination, he would perish.37
Remarkably, the location of the robot’s weak point was biologically determined. According to Hippocratic writings of 410–400 BC on bloodletting procedures, the thick vein on the ankle was the site of choice for the deliberate bleeding of patients, a traditional therapeutic operation. Writing in about 345 BC, Aristotle cited the medical writer Polybus on the major human blood vessels running from the head to the ankle, where surgeons make incisions to drain blood. One characteristic of living creatures noted by Aristotle is that their blood must remain contained in vessels as long as they live; if enough blood is lost, they swoon, but if too much is lost, they die. As early as the fifth century BC, mythographers and artists placed the nail that sealed Talos’s “blood vessel” at the most logical anatomical place, corresponding to the location of the human vein known to flow most freely, so that when breached by Medea it would cause the robot to bleed out, as a human being would.38
The idea that Medea could destroy with the “evil eye” was an accepted notion in antiquity. According to the physical theories of some natural philosophers and other writers, certain malevolent people could send deadly rays from their eyes like psychic darts into other people, causing them harm, ill fortune, even death. Plutarch, fo
r example, described the phenomenon as a “fiery beam” of malice emanating from an intense gaze. Medea’s eyes are described as dangerous to men throughout the Argonautica. With her evil eye, Medea transmitted hellish phantom images (deikela) into Talos’s being. Listening to the myth, people in antiquity would have visualized Talos’s eyes as looking quite lifelike, like those of Greek bronze statues they saw: such statues were painted realistically, and their eyes were inlaid with ivory, silver, marble, and gems, with fine silver eyelashes.39 But the evil eye should affect only living things. The idea of transmitting malevolent “rays” to disorient or destroy a machine raises the unsettling/unsettled question of Talos’s true nature. A guardian made of bronze was supposed to have magical protective power. Would a metal object with no feelings be susceptible to the evil eye? That Medea could cast an evil-eye spell to disorient Talos is another indication that he was something more than an insentient metal machine.
Thousands of years before Hollywood’s movie RoboCop (1987), about a cyborg police force, and the bionic assassins and bodyguards in the Terminator films (1984–2015) and other science fictions about cyborgs capable of deploying lethal force, the ancient Greeks could imagine robotic guardians created by supertechnology that imitated nature, biotechne. Talos, like modern ideas of cyborgs, and like other ancient automata made by divine craft, was envisioned as a hybrid of living and nonliving parts. Further, 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 the Talos myth, the sorceress Medea perceived the issues that have become themes in science fiction from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) to Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). The Talos myth was an early exploration of the idea that automata might come to desire to be real humans. As we saw, Medea intuited that, like a mortal being, Talos might fear his own death and long for immortality.
The Talos story also showcases how the Greeks envisioned the engineering brilliance of Hephaestus, the divine smith, inventor, and technician. The myth demonstrates that at a very early date, people could conceive the idea of manufacturing a bronze android with encoded instructions to carry out complex activities based on superhuman strength: Talos could recognize and track trespassers; he could find and pick up rocks, then aim and hurl the missiles from afar. He could also crush and burn enemies within reach. Most telling, Talos could be swayed by suggestion, revealing his hybrid living/nonliving nature, the uncanny “in-betweenness” that is a persistent hallmark of automata. The Talos myth embodies age-old questions about what it is to be human and free.40
Some of the questions raised by the Talos tale have not escaped modern video game makers. For example, a philosophical narrative puzzle created in 2014 plumbs conundrums of Artificial Intelligence (AI), free will, and “transhumanism,” the belief that advanced technology can enhance human physiology, psychology, and intelligence. The game is called The Talos Principle. A single player assumes the role of an AI robot that seems to have human-like consciousness and autonomy. Progressing through a complex world littered with classical ruins and relics of a lost modern dystopia, the player reacts to obstacles, clues, and choices to solve metaphysical dilemmas.41
More than twenty-five hundred years ago, the story of Talos set in motion ancient versions of the knotty questions about how to control automata, foreshadowing modern moral qualms that surround our robot-AI technologies. Some four hundred years ago, in 1596, poet Edmund Spenser employed a Talos-like figure—a mechanical android he named Talus—to address ethical issues of robots in The Faerie Queene. Can moral values be mechanized? Can machines understand justice or compassion? In Spenser’s allegorical epic poem, the automated squire made of iron was sent to help Sir Artegall, the righteous cavalier, in his quest to serve justice to villains. Invincible and relentless, the Iron Knight Talus takes his job literally. Becoming an inflexible killing machine without mercy, Talus is a symbol of an inhumane, unbending form of justice, with no interest in wrongdoers’ extenuating circumstances, motives, or backstories. Concerns about whether automata can be “programmed” with ethical values (to be “artificial moral agents,” AMAs, in robotic literature today), or whether automata could have emotions or “intuitions,” arose in ancient and medieval myths long before sweeping advances in technology made the questions so urgent.42
FIG. 1.11. Sir Artegall and his automaton squire, the Iron Knight Talus. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596), wood engraving by Agnes Miller Parker, 1953.
It may seem desirable to have a security system that dispatches guardians or agents created by superior intelligence to automatically perform preordained duties triggered by specific situations. But what if the situation shifts or it becomes necessary to interrupt the automatic response? How can humans control, disable, or destroy a powerful, unstoppable machine? How does one incapacitate an automated entity once set on track?
In the ancient myth of Talos, Medea’s duel with Talos turned on a twofold approach. Her knowledge of the robot’s internal system allowed her to exploit a physical flaw. She also perceived that the android might have evolved human-like “emotions,” such as a terror of termination. Armed with these two insights, Medea devised a trick and persuaded Talos to allow her to perform a technological-surgical operation on his body that would in fact annihilate him instead of fulfilling his innate drive or “wish” to go on forever.
The destruction of Talos was not the only time the techno-wizard Medea would wield her knowledge of artificial life to destroy an enemy by promising to cheat death.
TALOS IN THE MODERN WORLD
The solitary conduit carrying the mysterious force that animated Talos has been compared to an alternating electrical current. Bronze, being mostly copper, does have high electrical conductivity, but this fact was unknown in antiquity (although bronze colossi would have acted as lightning rods). In 2017, a writer for Popular Mechanics compared Talos’s ichor to the blue liquid that bleeds from imaginary humanoid robots in the popular television series HUMANS (their animating fluid is described as a “synthetic magneto hydrodynamic conductant”). The ancient image of Talos’s solitary conduit of mysterious ichor fluid may reflect something akin to what cognitive scientists call “intuitive theories” of children and adults about physics and biology. Even among people today who understand that an electrical circuit requires two wires, a mental picture persists of an empowering “juice” flowing through a single cable. Our “prescientific” intuitive vision coexists with modern scientific knowledge.43
In 1958, the author of a brief history of robots in Popular Electronics remarked on Talos’s “single ‘vein’ running from his neck to his ankle, stoppered somewhere in his foot by a large bronze pin.” Viewed in “modern terms,” the author mused, this conduit “could have been his main power cable and the pin his fuse.” Writing at the height of the Cold War, the author went on to declare that Talos was an ancient “Weapons Alert System and Guided Missile in one package!”44
Notably, that same year, 1958, the largest surface-to-air guided missile became operational. Fittingly, given Talos’s role as an automated adjunct of the superior Minoan navy, the new US naval weapon system was named Talos. When development began in 1947, the military planners sought “an appropriate name.” They found it in Thomas Bulfinch’s popular Age of Fable (1855). According to the official history of the missile, Talos “watched over and guarded the island of Crete. He was made of brass and was reputed to fly through the air at such terrific speed that he became red hot. His method of dealing with his enemies was to clasp them tightly to his breast, turning them to cinders at once.” In this modern telling, Talos was airborne, recalling the winged images of Talos on the coins of Phaistos, and he was heated by intense friction, but these details are not found in any Bulfinch edition or ancient text.
FIG. 1.12. Talos RIM-8 missile, 1950s. US Army/Navy archive
s.
Talos was “approved as the name for the new ramjet missile” in 1948. The Talos guided missiles patrolled the seas mounted on large naval carriers, ready to launch their warheads at enemies. Paralleling the duties of the mythical bronze robot on Crete, the Talos missiles served as a frontline defense, with a range of two hundred miles and a speed of Mach 2.5 (almost 2,000 mph, twelve times the estimated speed of bronze Talos). Like Talos ceaselessly circling his territory, spotting and tracking invaders, and then lobbing rocks to destroy foes, the Talos defense system was automatically directed, but it was partly autonomous at closer range. The Talos guided missiles “rode” a radar beam most of the way to the vicinity of the target but then homed in on the target “semiactively.”45
Modern military fascination with the myth of the great bronze robot continued. In 2013, inspired by the age-old science fiction of an invincible warrior made of the strongest materials and most advanced technology, the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a project to create a futuristic, robotic exoskeleton suit of armor for special operations (special ops) soldiers, something akin to the weaponized suit worn by the superhero in the film Iron Man (2008). Human enhancement and augmenting mortal powers are very ancient ideas, as we’ll see in chapter 3. The idea for the high-tech armored suit arose from a commander’s desire to protect his men in unconventional battle situations in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the Greek myth of Talos in mind, SOCOM devised the name Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit in order to render the acronym TALOS. The full-body form-fitting powered armor, intended to provide superhuman strength, hypersensory awareness, and ballistic protection, includes embedded computers, biosensors, enhanced vision and audio capabilities, solar panels, and features that capture kinetic energy. The plans for TALOS even call for an electronically activated “liquid body armor” system developed by MIT, which cannot help but recall the ichor of the immortal gods. As of this writing in 2018, TALOS is still unrealized.46
Gods and Robots Page 4
