ABSTRACT
Stroup starts with robotics. The Greeks made self-acting machinery such as an automaton theater, a first step toward building a real robot, and they imagined a mythological one. Talos, a bronze being made by the god Hephaestus patrolled the island of Crete and threw rocks at threatening ships, anticipating today’s development of intelligent battlefield weaponry that chooses its own targets. The students generally experience a kind of existential crisis at some point in the author's class once they realize how much was lost from antiquity and how relatively little the modern period has produced. Ethics is a Greek invention. Aristotle was the first philosopher people know who began to write treatises concerned with what came to be known as ethical philosophy.
