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An Interview with Adrienne Mayor — Historian of Ancient Science and Classic Folklore
During my research for the article Everything is Possible: Humans Had Robots Since Ancient Egypt one woman kept continually coming up — Adrienne Mayor. With a little research, I learned that amongst other things, she is historian of ancient science. She’s written a number of fascinating books on this topic, like “An Artificial Intelligence Wake-Up Call from Ancient Greece,” “Tyrants and Robots,” and the book that seemed most pertinent to my article “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.” Her work has been translated into thirteen languages (French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Greek). And you may have seen some of it if you like the History Channel, Discovery Channel, or the BBC. So needless to say, I was excited to have the opportunity to ask such an influential scholar some questions about robots!
Defining What a Robot Is
One of the biggest challenges that developed when I started writing an article about the history of robots was deciding what counts as a robot. I asked Dr. Mayor for her thoughts on the matter. She said, “A robot is usually a machine or self-moving object, often in android shape, that has inner workings, a power source, and can ‘sense’ its…
