From the archive: Varieties of childhood
Many Minds
Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired July 10, 2025] Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are adored and catered to—they're given their own menus and bedrooms. They're considered delicate and precious, and so we cushion them from every imaginable risk. Kids are encouraged to play, of course—but very often it's under the watchful eye of anxious adults. This, anyway, is how childhood looks in much of the United States today. But is this the way childhood...
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From the archive: Philosophers on psychedelics
Many Minds
Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We will be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired May 14, 2025] Some call it the "psychedelic renaissance." In the last decade or so, interest in psychedelic drugs has surged—and not just among Silicon Valley types and psychiatrists and neuroscientists. It's also surged among a stereotypically soberer crowd: academic philosophers. The reasons are clear. With their varied and sometimes transformative effects, psychedelics raise ethical questions, epistemological questions,...
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The origins of Darwin's ideas
Many Minds
No discipline, no sphere of intellectual life, has been untouched by the work of Charles Darwin. He died in 1882 but his ideas are very much alive; they're now central to how we understand the natural world, the human mind, non-human minds, plants, biogeography, morality and emotion, culture, language, and more. But where did his ideas come from? How did they grow out of his travels, his social circle, his hobbies, his particular cast of mind? My guest today is . Janet is Professor Emerita at Harvard University in the department of the History of Science. She is perhaps best known for...
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The sparkling deep
Many Minds
It’s tempting to see bioluminescence as an oddity, one of those rare eccentricities of life on earth. And, on land, maybe that’s true. But our planet is mostly water, and out in the open ocean bioluminescence is utterly commonplace. Creatures of all shapes and sorts sparkle and glow, glitter and pulse. But what are these displays for? Why did they evolve? How did light become the currency of the deep? My guest today is . Sönke is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Duke University, where he and his research group study the visual ecology of the ocean. He’s the author of...
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Is Man the Hunter just a myth?
Many Minds
There's a story about of our past that you know well. It goes like this: At some point earlier in human evolution, we started to hunt. Men in particular—perhaps channeling some deep-seated aggressive impulses—began to seek out big game. This new food source, this bonanza of calories, was what allowed our brains to expand. It changed our bodies and our societies and sent our species off on a whole new track. In short, Man the Hunter made us human. This story—told in different versions, with different points of emphasis—has circulated for decades. It's been debunked and revived, rejected...
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Babies, dogs, and the riddles of word learning
Many Minds
It's kind of astonishing, really, that kids ever learn words. Each one poses a little riddle. Does this sound string refer to a person? A category of things? Or maybe some other feature of the blooming, buzzing world? And yet word learning happens. In fact, we now know it begins earlier in infancy than we realized. And we now know, further, that dogs (or at least some dogs) understand words as well. So how does this happen? What do babies and dogs really know about words? And how might we go about figuring this all out? My guests today are and Dr. Claudia Fugazza. Elika is an Associate...
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The inner life of the hand
Many Minds
Newton saw in the human hand proof of the divine; Darwin saw a key to our species' success. Many others, too, have described the hand in hyperbolic terms, as a paragon of design, a cornerstone of human uniqueness, an engine of our achievements. But what makes the human hand so powerful? Is it the proportions of the fingers? Is it the opposability of the thumb? Or, could it be none of this? Could it be that the real power of our hands lies—not in the physical design—but elsewhere, out of sight? My guest today is . Matt is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of...
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From the archive: The cuttlefish and its coat of many colors
Many Minds
Hi friends! We're skipping a beat to take care of some spring housekeeping tasks. We will be back in May! In the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired April 30, 2025] We humans have a hard time becoming invisible. For better or worse, we're basically stuck with the skin and body we have; we’re pretty fixed in our color, our shape, our overall appearance. And so we're fascinated by creatures that aren't—creatures that morph to meet the moment, that can functionally disappear, that can shape-shift on a dime. And no creatures are more skilled,...
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Illuminating cave art
Many Minds
Deep in our past, in the dark depths of caves, our ancestors did something strange and beautiful. Working by firelight, some doodled little designs. Others made hand stencils. Some saw a bulge of rock, or a crack in the wall, and thought to turn it into a horse or a bison. Why did they make this art? What did it mean to them? Who were these artists? These questions are old—very old—but thanks to new methods and new interpretive frameworks, archaeologists are beginning to see them in a new light. My guest today is . Izzy is an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark,...
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What can AI teach us about the mind?
Many Minds
Everyone is talking about AI these days. Often these conversations are about how AI might upend education, or work, or social life, or maybe civilization itself. But among cognitive scientists and psychologists the conversation inevitably drifts toward other questions. What does this latest generation of AI tell us about the human mind? Is it putting old ideas and theories to rest? Is it ushering in new ones? Will AI—in other words—also upend cognitive science? My guests today are and . Mike is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where focuses on language learning and...
info_outlineHi friends, we're busy with some spring cleaning this week. We'll have a new episode for you in two weeks. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!
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[originally aired Nov 30, 2022]
When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. What’s coming next? Where is the technology going? How will artificial intelligences reshape our lives and worlds? But it's also worth looking to the past. When did the prospect of manufactured minds first enter the human imagination? When did we start building robots, and what did those early robots do? What are the deeper origins, in other words, not only of artificial intelligences themselves, but of our ideas about those intelligences?
For this episode, we have two guests who've spent a lot of time delving into the deeper history of AI. One is Adrienne Mayor; Adrienne is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Our second guest is Elly Truitt; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.
In this conversation, we draw on Adrienne's expertise in the classical era and Elly's expertise in the medieval period to dig into the surprisingly long and rich history of AI. We discuss some of the very first imaginings of artificial beings in Greek mythology, including Talos, the giant robot guarding the island of Crete. We talk about some of the very first historical examples of automata, or self-moving devices; these included statues that spoke, mechanical birds that flew, thrones that rose, and clocks that showed the movements of the heavens. We also discuss the long-standing and tangled relationships between AI and power, exoticism, slavery, prediction, and justice. And, finally, we consider some of the most prominent ideas we have about AI today and whether they had precedents in earlier times.
This is an episode we've been hoping to do for some time now, to try to step back and put AI in a much broader context. It turns out the debates we're having now, the anxieties and narratives that swirl around AI today, are not so new. In some cases, they're millennia old.
Alright friends, now to my conversation with Elly Truitt and Adrienne Mayor. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 – See Adrienne’s TedEd lesson about Talos, the “first robot.” See also Adrienne’s 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation.
7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter.
12:00 – For more on Adrienne’s broader research program, see her website; for more on Elly’s research program, see her website.
18:00 – For more on the etymology of ‘robot,’ see here.
23:00 – A recent piece about Aristotle’s writings on slavery.
26:00 – An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today.
30:00 – A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism.
34:00 – See Adrienne’s popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha.
38:45 – See Elly’s article about how automata figured prominently in tombs.
47:00 – See Elly’s recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the “invention of time.” For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin’s book, The Restless Clock.
50:00 – An article about a “torture robot” of ancient Sparta.
58:00 – A painting of the “Iron Knight” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Adrienne Mayor recommends:
The Greeks and the New, by Armand D’Angour
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens
In Our Own Image, by George Zarkadakis
Ancient Inventions, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe
Elly Truitt recommends:
AI Narratives, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon
The Love Makers, by Aifric Campbell
You can read more about Adrienne’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Elly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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