The Fantasies of Gods. Ancient Myths and Predictions of the Future in the Ancient World

«The first» robot to walk the earth was the bronze giant Talos. Created by the ancient Greek god Hephaestus over 2500 years ago, he guarded the island of Crete. The sculptor Pygmalion breathed life into the statue of Galatea, and the wonders of Daedalus inspired people for many centuries. Mythical automatons and innovative structures appear in Indian and Chinese, Greek and Roman legends long before the wind-up mechanisms of the Middle Ages and the development of science in the modern era. In this captivating and unusual book, historian Adrienne Mayor explores how the imagination of ancient people created incredible devices on the border of myth and reality. Through a vast body of sources, the author demonstrates how Antiquity anticipated modern discoveries in robotics and predicted the age of artificial intelligence, for science has been driven by imagination since time immemorial.