Hardly a day goes by without someone making excitable predictions about human progress and how, thanks to AI, we are all going to become algorithms served by robots. The ancients took a different view.
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Brendan O’Neill
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All ancient man had available to him was what nature in its raw state offered. Only fire (e.g. cookery, metal-work) or man’s ingenuity (e.g. papyrus, concrete, the arch) could significantly alter it. But men could still fantasise about flying to the moon, or imagine a world in which ‘Every stream ran with wine; fish came to the house, baked themselves, and served themselves up at table; rivers of soup, swirling with meat chunks, flowed by the dining couches; thrushes, served with milk cakes, flew down men’s gullets.’
But they could at least celebrate what technological advances they had made.
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