
Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology - diodorus
https://spectator.us/robots-ancient-greeks-loved-alexa/
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psiops
All this further supports the theory that the gods of old were in fact a
highly advanced civilization quite apart from but meddling with nascent human
civilization. I love that idea :).

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posterboy
I think you mean out of space aliens but technically advanced messengers
bringing teachings like agricultur, writing, and metallurgy, demanding
offerings in return and keeping relative peace fits the bill just as much,
especially if the Lords ventured from places high in the sky, mountains that
is.

At a lower layer, it's just veneration of the elders, preservation of memory
through old stories traveling through time, not space.

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madeuptempacct
I didn't read the article, but I feel like we might rapidly get to the point
where technology is magic. As arrogant as using "even" in this context sounds
- EVEN people on here generally don't understand more than a few fields. For
example, when it really comes down to it, the way pain meds work might as well
be magic to me, though I could probably sputter some scientific-sounding
explanation that I really don't understand. Same with modern computers - I can
mumble about logic gates, but the reality is that my electronics knowledge
stops at vacuum tubes, just because that's what's accessible without an
EE/chemistry specialization.

~~~
empath75
To me ‘magic’ is the gap between our internal models of the external world and
reality.

You stand before a magician, he is holding a card. You believe this to be true
because some photons entered your eyes and your mind constructed a realistic
simulation that conforms to the sensoral input.

The magician waves his hand— the card disappears — in a very real sense. The
simulation that your consciousness creates and inhabits has updated and erased
the card from your reality.

That it is in fact behind his hand and that he was able make your internal
model of reality diverge from actual reality with some words and a gesture is
what creates magic.

So how does this apply to technology — if the technology is so advanced that
your mind can’t model it’s behavior — then it perpetually creates that
divergence by merely existing. You’re always going to have to update your
mental model to account for what it does.

But I think that sort of magic is fairly temporary, because people are nothing
if not adaptable — hand an iPhone to a toddler and it’s simply another new
thing to explore and understand, no more mysterious than the light sparkling
from a glass of water or a leaf blowing in the wind.

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agumonkey
should technology only stay at near dream state ?

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PavlovsCat
Rant incoming.

I doubt they "would have loved Alexa" (which doesn't occur again in the body
of the article, at all). I mean, of course they would also have loved the idea
of owning slaves, but I still don't see how to get from there to Alexa, which
is beholden to Amazon, not the user.

[http://arkbooks.dk/leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-
are...](http://arkbooks.dk/leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-arendt/)

> Leisure — _skhole_ — can be seen as one of the acid tests of sorts here: In
> its positive capacity, it is a characteristic of _vita contemplativa_ as a
> specific freedom to abstain from the life of a political engagement. Its
> obverse, ‘un-quiet’ — _a-skholia_ — functioned traditionally as a negative
> term to characterise vita activa as seen from the philosophical perspective
> of ‘the absolute quiet of contemplation’.

That's kinda different from "not having to work so there's more time to
consume things, and having more money to be able to consume ever more
expensive things", which seems to the dream for many... rather than finally
having time to ponder everything, finally not having to ponder anything!
Because that is work, too. Or as a HN comment put it,

> _learning a huge amount of useless facts, [instead of] being able to look
> them up like the rest of society does_

That's the antithesis of the contemplative life. I don't think the Greeks
would have liked that, though I don't claim to know, that's just my
impression... and at any rate I disagree with them in some things, and agree
more with Arendt:

> A rehabilitation of _vita activa_ , and especially of the activity of
> action, the one defining for the human experience of freedom and for
> politics

Insofar automation and "AI" is just used by few humans to control many humans
without having to face them directly, it doesn't increase the freedom to act.
It gives "freedom" from having to be a free citizen, with the illusion of
being allowed forever to just graze on land the owners could turn into jungle
or a golf course, with the very same machines that make the masses obsolete. I
certainly don't buy that those who so far do their best to hoard and exploit
will suddenly want to share or even serve, that doesn't pass the smell test
for me.

Anyway, what's so unfathomable about making new life and treating it well and
being a good friend / parent, rather than a slave?

It's silly to talk about whether androids ( _Why androids? That 's an odd
choice of words, like seeming more human to us in shape would have anything to
do with their mental or emotional capabilities_) "can have a moral sense",
considering how we are currently using our moral sense. It's like people who
drink and fight all day, and don't have a book in the house, and keep hitting
their child on the head all the time, asking about whether it might attend
university one day. The actions kinda betray that they're not seriously
asking, they just want to be able to say "it wasn't our fault, we hoped our
child would make it".

It generally feels more like it's not even about making "another human, or
something even more human than humans", but simply robbing humans of their
humanity. We seem happy to equate showing all the right "signs of empathy"
with actually feeling it on the inside, basically adopting the the approach of
a sociopath.

> _" All you have to do is keep quiet about the failure of the Voigt-Kampff
> test here today. You and your colleagues keep going as you are, we start
> feeding Nexus Sixes into the earth population, and in a couple of years you
> make out you've suddenly discovered the test mistakes human beings for
> androids. But by then, it'll be too late to turn the clock back."_

> _" So human beings won't be able to tell themselves apart from androids."_

> _" Nor androids from human beings."_

> _" And so we forget what it really means to be human."_

> _" No fuss. Let society and its attitudes just evolve."_

This is like a car with no wheels, and some say it's for transportation, but I
say it's to block a road. If it was for transportation, why does nobody care
that it has no wheels?

What if empathy and morality isn't _just_ something that is instinctive or
selfish, something you can just "train" or get by applying "game theory", but
also the result of relationships, as they actually are, infinitely complex and
unique? Can empathy and morality exist without relationships as a person with
other person? I don't know, but would rather try that route first, not the
slave / tool route.

I mean, life can be kinda hard and confusing, it's actually really hard for
many of us, even though we have so many other people to speak with and learn
from. What will AI have? The comforting knowledge that the rights-holders are
doing great on the stock market? Or not even that, but just a bunch of data
with no inherent meaning, and people who kill each other over what is true and
what isn't? We currently live "might is right", and that combined with AI is
supposed to produce... androids with a moral sense? Wat?

And even if we give our AI other AI friends it can do more than fight with,
but still treat it like shit (which treating someone like a tool is), will it
ever have a moral sense regarding _us_? Why would it? So why not start it like
you want it to continue? Why start with vivisection, when we want to end with
some kind of soppy "love on first sight, happily ever after" story?

You don't work in a clean room to get clean. Likewise we can't make AI to
become better ourselves, we need to be better before we can make AI that is a
"person" that will want more of us than a swift mercy killing.

We ask so much what AI can do for us, precious little what it might need of
us, what could be fun for both. As Bill Hicks said, let's make a nice world to
bring children _into_.

