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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
The quest for artificial intelligence (ai) begins with dreams – as all quests do. People have long imagined machines with human abilities – automata that move and devices that reason. Human-like machines are described in many stories and are pictured in sculptures, paintings, and drawings.
You may be familiar with many of these, but let me mention a few. The Iliad of Homer talks about self-propelled chairs called “tripods” and golden “attendants” constructed by Hephaistos, the lame blacksmith god, to help him get around. And, in the ancient Greek myth as retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Pygmalian sculpts an ivory statue of a beautiful maiden, Galatea, which Venus brings to life:
The girl felt the kisses he gave, blushed, and, raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover and the sky.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) dreamed of automation also, but apparently he thought it an impossible fantasy – thus making slavery necessary if people were to enjoy leisure. In his The Politics, he wrote.
For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if – like … the tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet [that is, Homer] says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of gods” – shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plucker [the tool used to pluck the strings] play a lyre of their own accord, then master craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.
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