The Myth of Daedalus

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Daedalus sacrificed his son in the name of scientific experimentation where sometimes that can make it on without breaking a few eggs. He's got to give Daedalus credit you know he really figured a whole bunch of stuff out at least according to the stories. One of the most infamous of his inventions was the artificial cow that he made for Queen Pasifie. She was a perverse desire to mate with a bowl in her husband King Minos's pastures. The gods made her fall in love with the with the bowl and so she asked Daedalus to make her an artificial cow so that she could enter the cow and in that way fool the bowl into having sex with Pasifie

The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It should probably come as no surprise that these ideas aren’t new to modern society — they go way back, at least to the stories and mythologies of ancient Greece. Today’s guest, Adrienne Mayor, is a folklorist and historian of science, whose recent work has been on robots and artificial humans in ancient mythology. From the bronze warrior Talos to the evil fembot Pandora, mythology is rife with stories of artificial beings. It’s both fun and useful to think about our contemporary concerns in light of these ancient tales. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar Classics and History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University. She is also a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her work has encompasses fossil traditions in classical antiquity and Native America, the origins of biological weapons, and the historical precursors of the stories of Amazon warriors. In 2009 she was a finalist for the National Book Award. Web page at Stanford Amazon author page Wikipedia Google Scholar Video of a talk on Amazons Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.