S14E8 (Season Finale): Before Nolan's Odyssey — The Robots of Ancient Greece and the History of AI
What if one of the oldest stories in Western literature is also one of the earliest stories about artificial intelligence?Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has brought new attention to Homer's epics — but they're only the beginning of a much longer story about intelligent machines. In this Season 14 finale, historian of science Professor Elly R. Truitt (University of Pennsylvania) traces that story from Homer's self-navigating ships and golden handmaidens, through the bronze giant Talos of wider Greek myth, to the mechanical courts of Baghdad and Byzantium, medieval Europe, and today's anxieties about AI. Along the way: what these machines reveal about slavery and servitude in the societies that imagined them, and why — as Truitt argues — a technology that further concentrates power in the hands of people who already have it was never actually revolutionary.
