This is the first part of a two-part story. Find the second part here.
Creation stories and the artificial man
The “artificial man” is not a new concept. Today, we call them robots, but many cultures have a myth about the creation of man and often it is a god who, through the use of divine powers, makes man out of some inanimate material. We all know the version of the Bible:
7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. (King James Bible, Genesis 2)
A very poetic version of the creation story can be found in the Slavonic Book of Enoch:
his flesh from the earth;
his blood from dew and from the sun;
his eyes from the bottomless sea;
his bones from the stone;
his reason from the mobility of angels and from the clouds;
his veins and hair from the grass of the earth;
his spirit from my spirit and from the wind.
Creation of a man from nothing is the ultimate fantasy of human empowerment, and it is not surprising that people from all cultures have been drawn to it. For tens of thousands of years we have been able to make effective tools for our everyday needs; for thousands we have been creating cities, domesticating animals and planting crops; we are now able to repair human bodies and to fight illnesses; but the dream of creating a full human being from inanimate materials is still far out of reach for our 21st century technologies. Our fascination with AI, though, surely owes a lot to that dream. When an intelligent, connected speaker in one’s home is able to answer a simple, verbal question, the whole process has an almost magical appeal to it. And creating AI systems is a thrill next only to actually creating live human beings.
Elisabeth Frenzel, a professor of literature studies, pointed out that the theme is not only connected to man’s urge to create, but also to the fear that the creature could in the end overtake and suppress its creator, and that therefore most of these creation stories end unhappily.
For the following, let’s understand “Artificial Man” as a (fictional) human-like creature, which has been created by man by means other than natural reproduction. The list of such imagined creatures is very long and spans millennia and the whole globe. We will therefore look only at a very few prominent examples.
The artificial man in Ancient Greece and Rome
According to the Roman poet Ovid, Prometheus, a Greek demi-god, formed men from soil and water and then he gave them life. This is very similar to the Biblical creation story of Adam.
Hephaistos was the ancient Greek god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes. Hephaistos was said to have created multiple artificial men. Among others, several …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
