Adrienne Mayor, “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology” (Princeton UP, 2018)

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek...