The Agora Speaker Series is hosted by the School of Liberal Arts. Lectures presented as part of the series are free of charge and are open to members of the School of Liberal Arts, the University and the general public.
Agora Talk by Dr Tatiana Bur
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UOW Wollongong - Building 20 Room 4
AI and/in ancient Greco-Roman worlds
Abstract:
The ideas of artificial and machine intelligence are found, it is said, as early as the Homeric epics of the 8th century BCE. To these epics, add stories from Greek myth such as the Bronze giant Talos, passages from the great philosopher Aristotle, mechanical automata sponsored by wealthy Hellenistic rulers and a pre-history of AI is written where ancient Greece looms large. This paper presses pause on this sort of pre-history and reevaluates the sources, the intentions and the cultural contexts of ancient Greek ‘intelligent machines’. Teasing apart the fictions, philosophies and technological realities of ancient AI, I seek to probe, and problematise, the notion that, even when it comes to AI, ‘we got it from the Greeks’.
Bio:
Tatiana is Lecturer in Classics ANU’s Centre for Classical Studies. Prior to this, she was the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Tatiana is ancient Greek cultural historian with particular interests in ancient technology, entertainment, and religion. Tatiana is the author of Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (due out soon with Cambridge University Press) and co-editor Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity (2024, Oxford University Press).