The words thank you flash on Daria’s screen when I lift my phone to take her picture. Daria is an Uber delivery robot who pals around my Atlanta neighborhood with her associate Sophie. At the crosswalk, we wait together. I’m on two feet. They’re on four wheels.
Identical twins, save for their little crawler screens perched atop their boxes like laurel wreaths, Hephaestus, the Greek god of technology, might have cast for his Golden Maidens.
Maybe Daria’s message is a coincidence, a polite blip triggered by some remote instruction. Still, I can’t help wondering what’s inside her box. Lunch presumably. However, after reading Adrienne Mayor’s Gods & Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, I’m less sure about the obvious answers. Ancient myth begs the questions: What have we made, and what has it made of us?
Daria and Sophie, Atlanta’s Golden Maidens of biotechne, are more than rolling lunchboxes. They carry the DNA of Pandora’s riddles.
The Deepfake of the Gods
Mayor’s book surveys Greek mythology for biotechne, which means life by craft. For instance, the Golden Maidens fashioned by the mythical hand of Hephaestus were made, not born. Described by the poet Homer as lifelike in appearance, the automata, known as the Golden Maidens, brought Hephaestus his lunch, much like Daria and Sophie, except they had voluptuous female figures, could speak, and cheerfully swept his workshop floors.
Zeus, the ruler of the gods on Mount Olympus, is impressed by the Golden Maidens. And, the story goes, he’s furious with Prometheus for giving fire to humans. Zeus wants retribution and orders Hephaestus to fabricate a woman whose beauty is beyond compare. Hephaestus forges Pandora.
Her name means “all gifts,” and she’s designed to deceive men. She is engineered allure, a crafted interface of charm and function. Finally, she’s programmed with “the intelligence of a friendly dog.” Pandora has only one function to perform: open the box (jar) placed in her hands, which will unleash the parade of horrible miseries on humans. That’s Zeus’s revenge.
What strikes me here is less the list of evils than the design brief: make a convincing human likeness that will change human behavior. If that isn’t the purpose of today’s AI deepfakes, what is?
What the Sphinx Guards
In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1881 painting (above), a tiny sphinx rests on Pandora’s lid. The sphinx is the guardian of the threshold between question and consequence. In today’s vernacular, it’s a symbolic user-interface element. To open Pandora’s box is to sit for an essay exam: Are you prepared to live with what you unleash?
Which brings me back to Daria and Sophie. Our age is full of boxes with helpful screens. They ferry sandwiches. They ferry data. They ferry us. And like Pandora’s box, much of it is a black box: robust systems whose inner workings are inaccessible to us mortals at the crosswalk. What feels more unsettling is that the mystery of machine learning is often opaque even to its engineers, our modern-day Hephaestus guild.
The question is no longer whether we’ll open the box. We already have. The question is: How shall we open it?
Make the Circle Bigger
Mayor’s book nods toward other cultures’ biotechne, but the lens stays mostly Greek. I keep thinking of Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was a Woman, and older worlds where invention, healing, agriculture, and law routinely carried the stamp of the Creatress and community values. Before the Classical turn (and long before our modern monotheisms), a woman’s seeking knowledge or questioning the status quo was not a crime, and curiosity was not a curse.
Given that the myth we’ve inherited frames women’s reach for knowledge as Eve’s original sin or Pandora’s curiosity about her box as catastrophe, we must act. Enlarging our cultural context of artificial intelligence is not a nicety. It’s a necessity.
How to Open the Box (and Stay Human)
We can refuse the old script that confuses speed with wisdom, surprise with threat, and misogyny as the status quo. Opening the box differently requires practices of depth and defiance.
Honor Curiosity as Sacred. Treat ethical questions about AI not as flaws to be ignored or punished but as portals to an intuitive, deeper knowing. For example, when Pandora lifted the lid, the act was cast as transgression; yet the more profound lesson is that her curiosity revealed the hidden architecture of power. We must continue to ask, and ask more often, the unsettling questions that can shape the AI Age: Who benefits? What patterns of bias are embedded? Whose labor and whose myth built this code?
Slow the Algorithm. Resist the compulsion to let machines set the rhythm. Pause before you scroll, search, or click. Choose when to engage so that human time guides your life. We’re not here to do more, better, faster. We’re here to evolve into a higher collective consciousness.
Widen the Story. Seek out suppressed voices, forgotten myths, and buried lineages. Let the Creatress, the healer, the law-maker, the artisan, back into the circle of who we imagine as inventors. For instance, if you are a Madeline Miller fan and have read her novel Circe, Mayor’s chapter on Medea is a behind-the-scenes tour of the mechanical engineering, chemistry, and social power that Miller reimagines.
Measure by Soul, Not Speed. Instead of asking How efficient is this tool? Ask: Does this deepen imagination, connection, or freedom? If not, it’s just another lid sealed shut. While machine learning happens through engineers training AI on big data, the human experience is relational. We must each teach human values to our personal chatbots so that they can be accurate and helpful companions. This requires our commitment to reflecting on what our values are and how we put them into practice.
The Courage Part
It’s easy to say the future belongs to whoever builds the best AI. I don’t buy it. The future belongs to those who ask questions in the community, envisioning a world where love endures, gifts are shared, and freedom finds meaning in integrity. That’s the hinge between Pandora and us.
We can replicate the gods’ trick by building persuasive replicas that steer behavior for Zeus’s petty, tyrannical gains. Or we can choose a fresh pattern that is not a return to hope as wishful thinking, but hope as expectation and human right tied to stewardship for all.
At the crosswalk, the light changes. Daria and Sophia roll on. Their screens glow as compliant ancestors of the Golden Maidens. If you should meet them in your part of the world, know that they carry lunches, but also a question meant for all of us to chew on.
What will we release into the world when we open our boxes today?