Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology

Abstract

In Norbert Wiener’s follow-up to Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), his surprise trade press success that introduced middle-America to the outrageous conceits of information theory, feedback, and an automated future, Wiener sought to translate what had long gone by the names of spirit, pneuma, or soul into numbers. “The physical identity of an individual,” wrote Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings, “does not consist in the matter of which it is made.” On the contrary, the human, was, at its core, a formal proposition and an algorithmic one at that (1954, 96, 101). Wiener’s conceit has now become common sense as efforts continue apace to turn the social world and ourselves into information-processing devices—from elite neuroscience laboratories to the algorithmic inquiries into digital habitations to popular websites such as www.lumosity.com. In her new book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor offers a beautifully produced survey of ancient imaginations that undergird Wiener’s dream of a human that is “made not born.” Her examples of early biotechnology—its promise and pitfalls—come mostly from “stories that envisioned ways of imitating, augmenting, and surpassing natural life” (1) in the Greek and Roman worlds with exemplary dollops from ancient India and China.