How AI (Artificial Intelligence) Could Benefit From The Writings Of The Ancients

Bio-techne

Half-human soldiers, robot servants and eagle drones – the Greeks got there first. Could an AI learn from their stories?

Adrienne Mayor | May 16, 2016

The question of what it meant to be human obsessed the ancient Greeks. Time and again, their stories explored the promises and perils of staving off death, extending human capabilities, replicating life. The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god Hephaestus, and the tragically inquisitive Pandora all raised the basic question of the boundaries between human and machine. Today, developments in biotechnology and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) bring a new urgency to questions about the implications of combining the biological and the technological. It’s a discussion that we might say the ancient Greeks began.

"South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-dol competes against Google computer program AlphaGo on March 10 [2016] in Seoul, South Korea." Source: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-03-30/deep-learning-and-artifical-intelligence

<more at https://aeon.co/essays/replicants-and-robots-what-can-the-ancient-greeks-teach-us; related articles and links: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600819/the-missing-link-of-artificial-intelligence/ (The Missing Link of Artificial Intelligence. We don’t know how to make software that learns without explicit instruction—but we need to if dreams of humanlike AI are to come true. February 18, 2016) and https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540001/teaching-machines-to-understand-us/ (Teaching Machines to Understand Us. A reincarnation of one of the oldest ideas in artificial intelligence could finally make it possible to truly converse with our computers. And Facebook has a chance to make it happen first. August 6, 2015)>