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Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes. On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World”:

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.

Here’s a passage from the magnificent translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound by poet John Scully and Aeschylus scholar C. John Herington:

I gave them intelligence,

   I made them

masters of their own thought.

I tell this

   not against humankind, but only to show

how loving my gifts were …

Men and women looking

   saw nothing,

they listened

   and did not hear,

but like shapes in a dream dragging out their long lives

            bewildered

they made hodgepodge of everything, they knew nothing of making

         brick-knitted

houses the sun warms,

nor how to work in wood.

They swarmed like bitty ants

   in dugouts

in sunless caves.

They hadn’t any sure signs of winter, nor spring

        flowering,

nor late summer when the crops come in.

All their work was work without thought, 

  until I taught them to see

what had been hard to see:

   where and when the stars

 rise and set.

What’s more, for them I invented

NUMBER: wisdom

   above all other.

                And the painstaking, putting together of

   LETTERS: to be their memory

   of everything, to be their Muses’

       mother, their

            handmaid!

And I was the first to put brute beasts

   under the yoke, fit them out

   with pack saddles, so they could take

 the heaviest burdens off the backs of human beings.

Horses I broke and harnessed

   to the chariot shaft

so that they loved their reins, they showed off 

the pride and wealth of their owners.

I, I alone invented

the seawandering

      linen wingd

chariots for sailors.

All these devices, I invented for human beings. 

….

All human culture comes from Prometheus.

These aren’t just an English major’s pedantic quibbles. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That even a “techno-optimist” inverts the Promethean myth reveals how deeply hostility to technology has penetrated our collective consciousness.

For thousands of years, the myth of Prometheus has taught us to appreciate the gifts of technē and the costs that bringing those gifts can exact. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our poetic past. He reminds us of the continuities of human culture as well as its flux. He unites the Two Cultures.

In that spirit, I cherish the hope that, as artificial intelligence makes the library of Herculaneum decipherable, we will recover the lost sequels to Prometheus Bound—an appropriate fruit of the latest Promethean gift.

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