CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

From the Flying Robot Talon to AI Monsters

Winged Talon robot built by Hephaistos for Zeus who gifted the giant metal robot to his lover, princess Europa — in Crete. Talon protected Europa and Crete by flying over the island 3 times a day. The bull, right, was Zeus, in the form of a bull. He brought Europa to Crete. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Prologue: ancient and modern uses of technology

There’s a tremendous civilization gap between the robots credited to the Greek god of metallurgy Hephaistos and to the robots of the 21st century powered by artificial Intelligence. But the idea remains the same. How to imitate the gods. The Greeks had several gods, supreme beings in power, intelligence, beauty and goodness. Hephaistos was one of those gods.

Hephaistos: copper coin, Malaga, Spain, late 3rd century BCE. Courtesy Numismatic Collection, Alpha Bank, Athens, Greece.

Hephaistos was a perfect metallurgist and engineer. S. A. Paipetis, modern scientist and former mechanical engineering professor at the University of Patras, studied the technologies of Hephaistos in the works of Homer. He concluded there was evidence of advanced technologies in the Homeric epics. He calls them “miraculous conceptions… ideas [which] pre-existed in the thoughts of Mycenean Greeks for almost three millennia before their appearance in the modern world” (The Unknown Technology in Homer, Springer, 2010, p. 118).

The reappearance of those advanced technologies in our times serves a different purpose. The public good dominated ancient Greek science and technology. Now it is mostly private interests and money. No wonder the writing and talk about AI is abstract, illogical, political, economic and self-serving.

Corporate chiefs who fund “data centers,” labyrinths floating in billions of gallons of water, don’t exactly care for diminishing water, much less for the future of America, humanity, civilization and the planet. Their sole purpose is the generation of enough electricity to fuel their AI machines.

AI: Not intelligence but military engineering

These AI machines pretend to imitate human voice and even human calculation. And despite the name, Artificial Intelligence, the AI machines are artificial but not intelligent. Intelligence is almost a divine gift of reason and knowledge wrapped by wisdom, justice and the good........

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