If There Had Been Artificial Intelligence in Antiquity

A while ago we imagined what would have happened if there had been social media in antiquity. This time let us ask a more ambitious question: what if there had been artificial intelligence? The strange thing is that the people of the ancient world were not as foreign to this idea as we might think.

The Delphic Oracle: the first chatbot

How did the Delphic Oracle answer?

Everyone who came to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi did the same thing. They asked a question and waited for an answer. The questions were answered by the priestess, the Pythia. Some famous answers were so ambiguous that they could be read any way at all.

According to Herodotus, King Croesus of Lydia asked what would happen if he went to war against the Persians. The answer he received said that if he marched against the Persians he would destroy a great empire. Croesus went to war, and a great empire was indeed destroyed. But it was his own.¹ When Croesus reproached the oracle, the reply he received sounds familiar: he should have asked which empire was meant.

A system that speaks confidently and, when misunderstood, can say “I told you so”… It is not unfair to call Delphi the ancestor of today’s chatbots.

Babylonian scribes: masters of autocomplete

How were letters written in Mesopotamia?

In Mesopotamia, being a scribe meant copying the same texts onto clay tablets for years. Trainee scribes memorised ready-made formulas and wrote letters and contracts with them. Letters also began with a set formula. A letter to a superior, for example, opened with “Say to my lord: thus says your servant.” An experienced scribe would supply the rest almost automatically.

In short, autocomplete was a profession thousands of years before it reached our phones. The only difference: a scribe who made a mistake had to answer for it himself.

The Library of Alexandria: the first data centre

How did the Library of Alexandria collect its books?

The Ptolemies who ruled Egypt wanted to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place. According to the physician Galen,² under Ptolemy III the books on ships arriving in the port of Alexandria were seized and copied, and their owners were given the copies instead of the originals.

Today people debate the collection of texts from the internet without permission to train large language models. It seems the question of the ethics of data collection is at least two thousand years old.

Talos: the bronze guardian of Crete

Was there an idea of robots in antiquity?

Greek mythology has a giant bronze man called Talos. According to one version, he was a gift from the smith god Hephaestus to King Minos of Crete.³ Talos walked around the island of Crete three times a day and hurled rocks at ships approaching the island. A machine that never slept, never tired and did only the task it was given… It is no exaggeration to say that the ancient Greeks were the first to imagine security robots.

The end of Talos is interesting too. According to one version, Medea tricked him and pulled out the nail that sealed his single vein. The bronze giant stopped. The first security vulnerability in history may well have happened in a myth.

Socrates and the debate on writing

Why did Socrates criticise writing?

Perhaps the most familiar scene appears in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus.⁴ Through the mouth of the Egyptian king Thamus, Socrates explains that writing will make people forgetful. According to this story, people who trust writing will stop keeping knowledge in their minds; they will seem knowledgeable but will actually know very little. You could put these sentences into a newspaper column about artificial intelligence today and nobody would notice.

The irony is that we know Socrates’s thoughts today only because Plato wrote them down.

What has changed?

There was no artificial intelligence in the ancient world, but there were people who imagined it, feared it and argued about it. The oracle’s ambiguous answers, the scribe’s formulas, the library’s hunger for knowledge and Socrates’s worry are still in front of us today. The only thing that has changed is that we now ask these questions on our phone screens rather than in a temple.

Notes

1. Herodotus, Histories, 1.53 (the oracle) and 1.91 (the Pythia’s answer to Croesus). ↩

2. Galen, commentary on Hippocrates’s Epidemics III. ↩

3. Apollodorus, Library, 1.9.26. Talos also appears in Apollonius’s epic Argonautica. ↩

4. Plato, Phaedrus, 274e–275b. ↩

References

1. Apollodorus. (1921). The Library (J. G. Frazer, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 121–122). Harvard University Press. (1.9.26)
2. Herodotus. (1920). The Persian Wars, Volume I: Books 1–2 (A. D. Godley, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 117). Harvard University Press. (1.53, 1.91)
3. Mayor, A. (2018). Gods and robots: Myths, machines, and ancient dreams of technology. Princeton University Press.
4. Oppenheim, A. L. (1967). Letters from Mesopotamia: Official, business, and private letters on clay tablets from two millennia. University of Chicago Press.
5. Plato. (1925). Phaedrus. In Plato in twelve volumes (H. N. Fowler, Trans.; Vol. 9). Harvard University Press. (274e–275b)