The Greeks worshiped their Gods. There was Zeus, the God of Sky and Thunder, the King of Gods. Prometheus made man, and Athena breathed life into them. Prometheus also stole fire from Zeus and gifted it to man. This proved to be the most valuable asset mankind ever had.
What started off with nomadic tribes, the man began to settle down. The house grew into a village, then into a town and then came the city. The human population began to climb upwards. And so began the struggle for land or as we know it today, War. Civilisations span the face of the Earth, each fighting the other for total world domination. Alongside the wars and population, another number was quickly growing; the number of innovations. Humans were quickly inventing new and more efficient ways to live. Empires spanned and prospered and destroyed and reigned.
Primarily agriculturalists, the wars warranted advancement in weapon technology. Metal proved to be the right way forward. The demand grew along with the population and it was no longer viable to mass produce weapons. Thus kicked in the Industrial Revolution. And then the population really started to grow. That’s the funny thing about supply and demand. It works both way. If you provide a lot of supply, the
room for demand to grow increases.
That doesn’t mean the war stopped. Now, the Earth was divided into countries, and they were fighting each other. After the two great wars, the humans seemed to have had enough. This period marked the era called Space Race. It was a beautiful period; an era of accelerated innovations fuelled by the thirst to claim the prize of first outside our atmosphere. Not only did the new technology propel man further away into space, but also closer on the planet it gave rise to the computer: a machine which performs computations as specified by a programmer.
This piece of technology really took off. The computers started performing more complex operations. Not limited to numbers, it could perform computations on textual data, images, videos. If that was not enough, we started inventing new forms of data: 3D, Holograms, etc.
This still wasn’t enough. The humans were a curious kind. They continued their exploration. Their next target was humans themselves; or more specifically, consciousness. The rise of Artificial Intelligence coupled with hardware technology gave humans the power to create the first robot. Did you think it was going to stop at that? Obviously not. They gave robots the power to think and reason. Take decisions based on a neural network.
The humans created Project Zeus: to create a race of robots who could think for themselves but act for their masters. Slowly most of the jobs were automated to the robots. Only one remained. Humans, on the verge of immortality and space expansion, had nothing else to do; they gave the robots the power to reproduce their own kind too.
The robots, now, are vaguely aware of the masters they serve, slowly fading out of their world view. Over generations of robots, the distant masters are myths. Only one word remains. There is the creator, they call him Zeus.
-Ashish Nehete, B.E.I.T