Gods and Robots by Adrienne Mayor
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A surprisingly rich and multi-faceted assessment of the ancients' engagement with automation both literal and mythic. At the core of the book is the question of how people imagine things that could exist, but do not yet exist, and specifically how the ancients engaged in the kind of imagining that we today call science fiction.
For example, the book opens with an examination of the creature Talos fought by the Argonauts. He was made by Hephaestus out of bronze and enjoyed a rudimentary sort of intelligence. On the one-hand, it's easy to view him as a sort of magically animated creature rather than a mechanical quasi-robot (he was made by a god, etc.), but the book dives deep into the specifics of the myth and its variants, which make clear that the ancients saw him as a mechanical automaton, with a column of fluid (ichor) providing a sort of quasi-hydraulic power source, which was sealed by a bolt in his ankle. Severing the bolt let all the ichor out, rendering him inoperative. Greek myth is full of similar explicitly manufactured creatures rooted in then-contemporary technological ideas. These literal automatons coexist side by side with non-technological "magic wand" type creations or magically animated forms that have no intrinsic technological explanation (such as Galatea). The Greeks clearly had room for both types of creature in their imaginations, just as we do.
This book is not for everyone, but if you enjoy classics/greek mythology and thinking about automatation this book is non-pareil.