philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

From Surveillance to Entertainment: The Ancient History of ‘Intelligent’ Machines

• Robots were so prevalent in the imaginative and material culture of the Greek-speaking world that they were seen as emblematic of Hellenistic culture by others.
• Buddhist legends focused on northeastern India from the fourth and third centuries BCE recount the army of automata that guarded Buddha’s relics.
• Robots and AI have long been used both to foreground and to trouble the conceptual boundary between born and made, and the related boundary between life and not-life.

See the full story here: https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/from-surveillance-to-entertainment-the-ancient-history-of-intelligent-machines/