1 WHY ARE WE SO SCARED OF ROBOTS

We begin this story with a kind of sex robot. The classical Roman author Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, stories of transformation, tells of an ancient Cypriot named Pygmalion. Pygmalion was what we would describe as a misogynist: he thought all women full of terrible vices and would have nothing to do with them. But he was also a sculptor and made a lifelike statue of an idealized woman. Then he fell in love with his own creation. He moved it into his bedroom and spent hours kissing and caressing it and looking into its eyes. Eventually he got so desperate that he went to a temple of Venus and prayed that the statue would become his wife. This being fiction, of course, Venus obliged, and Pygmalion's statue came to life, becoming Galatea. 1