Myth-Made Machines: How We Imagined AI

Kelly Vero and Dave Bradley
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AI wasn’t born in Silicon Valley. It has lived in our stories for thousands of years. In each episode, Myth-Made Machines authors Kelly Vero and Dave Bradley explore the myths, books, films, television, games and ideas that shaped how we imagine intelligent machines. Joined by a different story guest each week, they travel from ancient automata and Frankenstein to Hollywood robots and the future we thought was coming.

Episodes

  1. Jul 25 ·  Bonus

    The machine that shouldn't exist: Antikythera and the first AI

    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 workedWhy a machine that runs itself feels unsettlingly close to something intelligentThe hobbyist who rebuilt the whole thing out of LegoIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and what fiction does to real archaeologyWhy audiences instinctively reject impossible mechanics, from Transformers to The Legend of ZeldaSamuel Butler, Margaret Cavendish and the very old fear that machines might evolve past usWriting as a technology: specifications, design documents, and the Star Trek tricorder that became your phoneWhy 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.

  2. Jul 13

    Trailer

    Coming soon: How We Imagined AI, from the authors of Myth-Made Machines. From philosophy and literature to films, television and games, we’ll explore how popular culture has shaped our ideas about artificial intelligence - featuring Frankenstein, Metropolis, Star Trek, Metal Mickey and beyond. Here’s our trailer, offering a flavour of what’s to come...

Trailer

About

AI wasn’t born in Silicon Valley. It has lived in our stories for thousands of years. In each episode, Myth-Made Machines authors Kelly Vero and Dave Bradley explore the myths, books, films, television, games and ideas that shaped how we imagine intelligent machines. Joined by a different story guest each week, they travel from ancient automata and Frankenstein to Hollywood robots and the future we thought was coming.

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