Did Homer dream of androids?

In the beginning the gods had intelligent machines. Or this is what Homer seems to have heard in some Greek dark-age rumour, or to have seen in a prophetic dream. However he came by his information, Homer tells us that the gods are attended by smart machines on their magic mountain, Olympus.

Modern readers have not made much of this, but some of Homer’s ancient readers did. In the first pages of his Politics, Aristotle notes the revolutionary potential of such mythical devices. In a speculative way, he takes Homer’s divine machines seriously. He conjures up a society – arguably our own – in which machine power has transformed the slavery-based economy of antiquity. ‘If every tool could perform its own work’, Aristotle reasons, ‘masters would have no need of slaves.’

Aristotle then recites one of Homer’s lines about the machines on Mount Olympus. They are ‘self-moved’, he recalls. This is a fateful Greek word, automatos. It is this Homeric usage which ultimately gives rise to our modern word ‘automatic’. A different form of the same word, automaton, denoted lifelike machines for the Greeks, then the Romans, and finally the Europeans. It was only in the 20th century that a Czech neologism, robot, displaced the automaton.

The first appearance of automatos in the western archive is in Iliad 5, where we read that ‘the gates of heaven’ open thunderously ‘all on their own’. The scene is this: Hera is coming to confer with her husband and brother, Zeus, on Olympus. As she approaches the high god’s mountain fortress, its gates open to her automatically. The gates of heaven function, in Homer’s soaring mind, like living things – which is to say, on their own.

Centuries later a similar scene is included in the New Testament. In Acts of the Apostles we read that an ‘iron gate’ in Jerusalem opens ‘on its own’ for St Peter after a miraculous escape from prison. Like Homer, the author of Acts uses automatos to describe this self-moving structure.

Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad 18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20 devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’. This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then ‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too – is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace, bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they happen to be.

It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’ splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel to behold’.

In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally, intelligent.

As we have seen, Homer’s self-driving tripods were made by Hephaestus – god of the Greek forge. He is perhaps the most human of the Olympian deities – the only one who works, and the only one who is physically flawed. Hephaestus’ devotion to labour and his deformity both make him a liminal character in the charmed circle of the gods.

Hephaestus is a cuckold, too, a jealous and vindictive husband. It is with his notoriously unhappy sex life in mind that we can glance at one of Homer’s, and antiquity’s, most uncanny passages. Just a few pages after the Iliad’s description of self-driving tripods, there is a scene in which the poet shows us Hephaestus, in heaven, surrounded by a cluster of beautiful humanoid machines.

In this passage Hephaestus is toiling at his forge, surrounded by gleaming girl-like entities who are neither human nor divine. Their bodies are ‘cast in gold’, the poet tells us. Hephaestus has made a cohort of radiant assistants who are faithful to him in ways that his wife, in Homeric myth, will never be. But although they have metallic bodies, these chaste machines are still – we read – ‘a match for living, breathing girls’.

‘Intelligence fills their hearts’, Homer goes on, ‘voice and strength their frames.’ What more could we ask of the West’s first poet? He not only gives us an incomparable sequence of war and wandering, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but an archaic vision of reasoning machines.

The intelligence of Hephaestus’ companions does not make them human, or natural beings. (Homer is the first writer to speak of nature, physis in Greek, in an unforgettable scene in the Odyssey.) Having been manufactured by Hephaestus, these golden girls are – like his tripods – instances of artifice. They are unnatural, because unborn. (Is this why the robotic girl in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s bizarre Gothic tale, ‘The Sandman’, is named Olympia?)

Yet Hephaestus has made them intelligent in a far more radical way than his tripods. His humanoid machines are not only sensitive and active, but discursive. They have ‘voice’, Homer says, meaning speech and reason. They do not only assist the worker-god in his toil but hear him out and speak to him as well.

It may be hard for us to believe, but the poet’s language is clear: Hephaestus’ girls have artificial minds. We actually are glimpsing, here, a Greek dark-age apparition of divinely fabricated androids.

Now, Homer has no special term for humanoid machines – and neither does Aristotle. ‘Android’ is a modern word which is first attested in the 17th century. The phenomenally learned Gabriel Naudé is credited with having created the novel designation, androïde, in French. It is only after Naudé’s term begins to circulate that the android is recognised as a distinctive ‘category of machine’.

Are Hephaestus’ girls even machines? This is not how the poet describes them. Just as Homer has no ‘androids’, so, too, he has no ‘machines’. It will take centuries for Greek and Latin to find the words they need to describe Homeric epic. But his vision of what we might call ‘divine machines’ could nevertheless lead us to ask – as we rarely do – where our own word ‘machine’ originates.

The origins of the modern ‘machine’ seem to lie in a Greek root-word, mēchanē, which can be found in Hesiod’s poetry. Before we glance at the archaic significance of mēchanē it is worth noting that, in Hesiod’s myth of Pandora, she is an android. Like the golden girls in Iliad 18, Pandora is manufactured by Hephaestus in Works and Days.

In Hesiod’s telling it is a mechanical bride, an exquisite AI, who delivers the ‘gift of evil’ to humankind. It is certainly worth asking why a serpent in Genesis, humankind’s original tempter, is envisioned as a seductive machine in Works and Days. What does this say about the Greek and Hebrew imaginaries? (I have written before about the Fall narrative in Genesis and the idea of evil machines.)

In any case, Hesiod deploys the word mēchanē in his Theogony when he is describing for us the Cyclops, godlike beings who are ‘haughty’ but have ‘inventive skill (mēchanai) and strength and power’. This primitive connection of the word mēchanē to a clan of one-eyed titans is, I think, suggestive. Our current technological moment feels pretty Cyclopean.

What I find most intriguing in Hesiod’s line is just the fact that mēchanē is linked, here, at the very dawn of the West, to intelligence. Hesiod’s misshapen brutes, the Cyclops, are not merely gigantic – they are clever. They are not lacking in what we might call device. Much like the god-built girls in Homer, the god-born brutes in Hesiod have ‘inventive skill’. Perhaps what we now call machine intelligence can appear differently in this archaic light.

Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and ‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of ‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.

An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē. But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.

This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.

An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē, its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives, its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do we really know now?

It may or may not be possible for humans to construct ‘divine machines’ of their own – entities we can infuse with ‘mind’, like Hephaestus did his androids. All that we know now is that to do so would be to instil a strong and elusive power, one that Hesiod calls mēchanē, into artificial systems. And to do that would not just be to create a new tool, but rather, a new tendency on earth. A new drive and titanic genre of drive.

Whether that tendency, that drive would prove to be violent like the Cyclops, seductive like Pandora, or attentive like Hephaestus’ girls is impossible to foretell. But the Greek poets’ decision to link their heavenly machines to the figure of Hephaestus might tell us something that still invites reflection.

The only Greek god who made intelligent machines was both the most human and the unhappiest of gods. This suggests that the Greeks already knew that the heart’s capacity for pain, and for longing, is greater than any conceivable technology. Machines are a revelation, but never the final measure of human desire.