In 1901, sponge divers pulled a lump of corroded bronze from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. It took another century to work out what it was: a geared machine that modelled the movements of the heavens, built roughly two thousand years before anything else came close. A machine that, by every rule of history, shouldn't exist.
Welcome to the pilot episode of Myth-Made Machines, the podcast about how humanity imagined artificial intelligence long before anyone managed to build it. Authors Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero go looking for AI in myth, literature, cinema, television and games, rather than in press releases.
In this first episode, the Antikythera mechanism becomes the thread connecting Ancient Greece to Transformers, Star Trek to The Odyssey, and Archimedes to ChatGPT.
We talk about:
- The 1901 discovery, and what the 2005 CT scans finally revealed about how the mechanism worked
- Why a machine that runs itself feels unsettlingly close to something intelligent
- The hobbyist who rebuilt the whole thing out of Lego
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and what fiction does to real archaeology
- Why audiences instinctively reject impossible mechanics, from Transformers to The Legend of Zelda
- Samuel Butler, Margaret Cavendish and the very old fear that machines might evolve past us
- Writing as a technology: specifications, design documents, and the Star Trek tricorder that became your phone
- Why Homer keeps coming back, and how the road from The Odyssey leads to Talos, automata and modern AI
Next time: the gods who built robots.
Myth-Made Machines: How We Imagined AI by Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero is published by Bloomsbury.
Not an AI podcast. A podcast about the stories that made AI.
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