AI and the Humanities with Special Guest Talos, the First AI!
Talos as depicted in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Columbia Pictures
Several years ago, I was tasked with converting a distance learning Intro to AI Course into a 100% online format that a teacher or school could take, and with a few modifications, make it their own. This was pre ChatGPT and the GenAI explosion that followed, so it is sadly and probably laughably out of date today. For 75 minutes each day, two instructors, twenty or so students from across North Carolina, and I would come together on Zoom.
One of the instructors was a former engineer with a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Engineering and ran a robotics club, and the other had worked as a programmer for a decade before getting a Liberal Arts undergraduate degree and then a Master’s of Teaching and Learning from Harvard. As you might imagine, their approaches to an Intro to AI course were very different. There was some back and forth between them; the Engineer would roll his eyes at the Teacher’s empathy interviews, ethical debates, and futurist predictions, and the Teacher would roll her eyes at the Engineer’s regression analyses, linear classifiers, and kth nearest neighbors.
To be clear, this was all very much in good humor. Both The Teacher and The Engineer respected each other and their decisions and choice of material. The best part of this story is that their differing approaches made for a great experience for the students. There was engaging content for the students who were less technical and leaned more into humanities topics, and there was engaging content for those who were more technical. There was a really neat balance in both the course content and their teaching styles.
The point of this anecdote is that there is value and space in the humanities for learning about AI. Quite a bit of it actually. For example, debates over ethical issues of AI systems and how they are regulated might be more at home in a Civics class than in a Computer Science class.
For my part, I am very much a proponent of examining AI through the humanities lens. At the same time that I was working on the Intro to AI course, I was also putting together a Senior English Course Plan billed as “An Exploration of British Classic and Contemporary Science Fiction Literature Focusing on Artificial Intelligence.” It included guidance on how to have discussions related to AI in works of literature going back as far as Beowulf.
So what does it look like to include AI in a humanities class? Let’s dive in…
A long time ago, King Minos of Crete was having some troubles. Invaders kept sailing ships to his island and attacking it. So King Minos appealed to his father, who as it happened, was Zeus, the God of Sky and Thunder and all that. Zeus went to Hephaestus, his chief blacksmith and inventor, and asked him to work up something special. Hephaestus built a bronze statue that could walk and fight off attackers, predominately by hurling boulders at their ships (although in some versions it was made of fiery, molten bronze and its primary attack was hugging enemies to death). In the film Jason in the Argonauts, Talos is depicted as being enormous, while in mythology it was anywhere between eight feet and eighty meters tall. A big metal statue that moves on its own and makes its own decisions sure does sound like… an AI embodied robot, you might be thinking? Talos is credited with being one of the earliest recorded imaginings of something like AI.
What is the value of examining Talos as an early AI instead of just another piece of Greek mythology? How is Talos relevant today? We look at Greek (and other) mythologies to examine what was important to ancient peoples, and while they may have believed many things we know not to be true today, their myths illuminate that they often valued and thought about things that we value and still think about today. This would include, it would seem, the creation of artificial intelligence. The ancient Greeks certainly did not have the technical understanding to build an autonomous robot, so their workaround was to have their gods do it. Similarly, today we still do not have the technical know-how to build a truly autonomous robot capable of defending an enormous island all by itself. However we have an enormous amount of science fiction devoted to similar ideas. The point here is that it’s worth a discussion with students about how the idea of a machine like Talos has stuck with humanity for a very long time, and how we are much closer to building something like Talos than the Greeks were.
This leads into the next way we can use Talos to talk about AI: What systems and capabilities would Talos need in order to be successful at its job? Let’s start with basic movement. Crete is not a simple island; it’s about the size of Delaware with 650 miles of coastline. There is a mixture of sandy beach and rocky shoreline, so Talos was traversing some tricky terrain. Have you watched robots move across difficult terrain? This is a perfect opportunity to introduce students to sensors and perception. You can insert your favorite video of Boston Dynamics or some other robot attempting to keep its footing, as well as how they map or “see” the terrain around them. This video demonstrates a robot programmed to prioritize sense of touch over its visual sensors to navigate across visually deceptive terrain like deep snow.
Talos also had to keep an eye out for enemy ships. How could it tell which ships belonged to Crete, which were enemies, and which might be simple travelers or traders from afar? Sounds like a job for image recognition! This would make for a fun class activity with Google’s Teachable Machine. Using pre-gathered images, students could train it to tell the difference between a few different types of sailing ships and classify them as enemy, friendly, unknown, or whatever other labels you wanted to use.
Once correctly identified, how would Talos actually defend against attacking enemies? What would it need to know and what kinds of decisions would it have to make? For starters, it would need to know which threats to prioritize over others. For each type of threat, it would need to have a response: how to react to a ship firing a catapult, or a ship that had already landed, soldiers attacking him or Cretans on land, what to do in the case of cavalry, the priority for defending himself vs. defending Cretan people, etc. How would Talos know when to stop attacking? Could it recognize surrender? Or when an enemy was subdued? All of these questions make for great thought exercises in how we would program our own Talos.
You can even extend this into more abstract areas of design: How would we build our Talos? Are there advantages to having it be human shaped? Would it be more effective as say, a giant spider? Would there possibly be a psychological advantage to a certain shape? You can turn this into a design challenge exercise where students determine how they would build Talos and what decisions they would program it to make. Add whatever guardrails you need for your students and turn it into a class competition.
I’m not suggesting that ELA or Social Studies teachers need to build out an entire AI unit centered on Talos, or that Intro to AI teachers need to build out an entire Greek Mythology unit, but I believe there is real value in taking some time to explore where the ideas and imaginings of the past intersect with those of today. I certainly cannot be the first person to have wondered if Talos ever hurled boulders at the wrong ships. I imagine some early Greeks (especially sailors who might find themselves headed to Crete) asked very similar questions when they first heard the story of Talos. I have also watched students in Computer Science and Intro to AI courses work through projects designing hypothetical systems and devices. With Talos, we can give students the experience of a design exercise, a fun activity training an image recognition model, learning about sensors and perception, exploring a facet of World History, and connecting that early history and literature to our lives today, all with one giant bronze statue. This is why I am a proponent of building space in our humanities courses for AI, and vice versa.
