The First Sex Robot Was Conceived in Ancient Greece

[steven36]

The age of android brothels and lifelike sex robots may seem cutting edge—until you’ve heard the story of the man who had sex with his ivory sculptures, and the Greeks who habitually had public intercourse with statues.

 

 

In an excerpt from her new book, Gods & Robots, a deep and lively look at how Greek and other early mythologies conceived of artificial intelligence and automation, author and historian Adrienne Mayor reveals how old the concept of the sexbot really is. — Brian Merchant

 

A number of Greek tales, as in other cultures’ myths, describe lifeless matter, statues, idols, ships, and stones brought alive by gods or magic.

 

The most familiar classical example of a statue magically enlivened by divine order is the myth of Pygmalion and his love for a nude ivory statue of his own making. Ovid’s version (Metamorphoses) is the most vividly detailed account of Pygmalion. The young sculptor is disgusted by vulgar real women, so he sculpts a virginal maiden for himself. In the modern imagination, his statue is often pictured as marble, but in the myth it is ivory, a warmer, organic medium. His ivory maiden looks so real that Pygmalion immediately “burns with passion for her,” caressing her perfect body with awe and desire, imagining that were he to press against her forcefully she would actually bruise. He showers the statue with gifts and words of love. In the Temple of Aphrodite he beseeches the goddess to make his “simulacrum of a girl” come alive.

 

Pygmalion returns home and makes love again to his fantasy woman’s ivory form. To his astonishment, the statue warms to his kiss, and in his embrace her body becomes flesh. Unlike cold marble, ivory is a once living material with a soft, creamy luster. In antiquity, ivory figures were tinted with subtle, naturalistic colors to resemble real skin tones. Ancient audiences would have imagined her as an exquisitely sensuous, flawless female form. Under her maker’s caresses, Pygmalion’s statue awakens into consciousness and she “blushes with modesty.” Aphrodite has answered his prayer.

 

It is important to emphasize that Pygmalion’s artifact was not constructed to be an automaton. Its realism became reality supernaturally, thanks to the goddess of love. This oft-told ancient “romance” of artificial life takes on new relevance today because it presages ethical questions posed by modern critics of lifelike robotic dolls and AI entities specifically designed for physical sex with humans. “Is it possible,” one writer asks, “to have consensual sex with a robot, even one that’s aware of its own sexuality?”

 

Although the Pygmalion myth is often presented in modern times as a romantic love story, the tale is an unsettling description of one of the first female android sex partners in Western history. It is not clear 108 Chapter 6 that Pygmalion’s passive, nameless living doll possesses consciousness, a voice, or agency, despite her “blushes.” Has Aphrodite transformed the perfect female statue into a real live woman, with her own independent mind—or is she now “just a better simulation?” The statue is described as an idealized woman, more perfect than any real female. So Pygmalion’s replica “surpasses human limits,” much like the sex replicants in the Blade Runner films that are advertised as “more human than human.”8 Ovid, notably, does not describe her skin and body as feeling lifelike. Instead Ovid compares her flesh to wax that becomes warm, soft, and malleable the more it is handled—in his words, her body “becomes useful by being used.”

 

Ovid ends his fairy tale with the marriage of Pygmalion and his nameless living statue. He even adds that they were blessed with a daughter named Paphos, a magical feat of reproduction intended to show that the ideal statue became a real, biological woman. Notably, the plot of the film Blade Runner 2049 turns on a similar magical reproduction of a replicant, the biological birth of a baby to the replicant Rachael, which is supposed to be impossible for artificial life forms.

 

In retelling the Pygmalion story, Ovid was drawing on earlier narratives, now lost. One source was Philostephanus of Alexandria, who recounted a full version of the myth in his history of Cyprus, written in 222–206 BC. In a variant by the later Christian writer Arnobius, Pygmalion sculpts and makes love to a statue of the goddess Aphrodite herself. No artistic representations of the Pygmalion myth survive from antiquity. But many medieval illustrations show Pygmalion interacting with his ivory statue; the tale served as a kind of prurient religious warning against worshipping idols. By the eighteenth century, European storytellers had finally given Pygmalion’s statue a name, Galatea (“Milk-White”). Variations on the Pygmalion myth have proliferated over millennia, inspiring myriad fairy tales, plays, stories, and other artworks.

 

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[nir]

Such stories abound in Indian epics also.  They are so common and familiar (even to children).