Prometheus was the Titan god who gave the fire of knowledge, intelligence, technology and civilization to the Greeks. Painting courtesy of Evi Sarantea. The painting is depicting the head of Prometheus, shining fire and light. Zeus sent an eagle to eat the liver of the deathless god to punish him for helping his Greek grandchildren. Right eye from statue and left representing the eye of a living man, thus showing the intimate connection of Prometheus with the Greeks. The falling drops represent the ceaseless influence of Prometheus, including perhaps the invention of Artificial Intelligence among the ancient Greeks.
Prologue
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an extremely interesting, if dangerous, technological, economic and political issue. The Greeks of Homer’s age, some 3,500 years ago, had imagined and probably employed some form of very advanced AI. Homer reports that Zeus informed Hermes that Odysseus would return home to Ithaca. And indeed he did. The Phaiakians of the island of Phaiakia / Kerkyra, Homer says, were like gods. They had extremely advanced technologies. Their ships, for example, sailed without pilots or necessarily the energy of the wind. Yet the ship that ferried Odysseus had crew and oars, too. Such a dream boat carried Odysseus and the bronze and gold gifts, including bread and red wine, the Phaiakians gave him and sent him to his beloved home, the island of Ithaca. Once on board, “Odysseus, who had a mind like the gods and, besides, had endured wars and the bitter sea, fell into deep sleep…. The swift ship run fast through the waves that even a falcon, lord of the skies, could have matched its speed” (Odyssey 5.37-44; 13.57-92).
Stephanos Paipetis, who was professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, examined the technology in Homer and concluded that the god of metallurgy, Hephaistos, was a perfect scientist and engineer and metallurgist. He built the Shield of Achilles with advanced knowledge and technology of metals and materials. In other words, Hephaistos “possessed deep knowledge of the dynamic mechanical properties of laminated composite structures.” The ship of the Phaiakians that carried Odysseus from Phaiakia (Kerkyra) to Ithaca, Paipetis says, was powered by artificial intelligence.
As I said, the technology of AI is about 3,500 years old. Most of that time, AI has been dormant, only to resurface during the 20th century.
AI in Greece
A Greek scientist and engineer, Ioannes Kontos, retired professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Athens, published (in English, in 2015, and in Greek, in 2017) a comprehensive guide of the scientific and logical thought that helped humans invent and create AI, especially in Greece. His book, Artificial Intelligence and its Applications in Greece, is outstanding. It reads well and narrates how trained engineers bring AI systems into being. It’s a step-by-step construction of AI systems. The book mirrors deep knowledge of advanced technology, moderation (σωφροσύνη) and practical wisdom (φρόνησης). It is a global overview of the rise of this polemical technology funded by militaries and plutocrats that privatize it for profit and protection. But the AI vision of the Greek professor Kontos is far from the hegemonic ambition and policies of the US plutocrats. He would like to see Greece start inventing, producing and employing advanced technologies, some of which materialize AI products that potentially and in fact benefit the public good. He admits, however, only modest success for AI products manufactured by Greek companies in the last 50 years. But he explains an AI system of questions and answers he and his colleagues invented. He calls it AMYNTAS (Automatic Meta gnostic Ypologistikon [calculating[ Trainable Answering System).
Kontos, with little doubt, the preeminent Greek expert on AI, taught AI for about 40 years. He is both an engineer, an inventor, and a scholar. He investigated Greek history from the beginnings of this technology. He studied the science of vision and its application on the Parthenon. Then he turned to Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of all time, who invented the sciences of zoology, meteorology, and logic. There would have been no AI without understanding the science of logic. Next, Kontos examined the toothed-geared technology of the genius of the Antikythera Mechanism. That astronomical computer or Meteoroskopeion was designed and built in the island of Rhodes in the second century BCE. It was about 2,000 years ahead of its time. The Antikythera astronomical computer led him to Hero of Alexandria, a polymath philosopher and engineer who flourished in the late first century BCE and the beginning of the first century of our era. Hero built automated machines, including a model of the first steam engine. Kontos hopes his book will inspire Greeks that a better future is possible. He wants his book to be read widely by students, executives of Greek companies, and Greek citizens. His message is that it is possible to build advanced technologies in Greece, where scientists and engineers will be paid high salaries. He does not want Greece to become a low-salaried workforce for rich investors. He is definitely against data centers in Greece. He is right. The country cannot afford the vast amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water to keep data centers operating.
Kontos is also correct on Greek students. Greek university students receive a remarkably excellent education, especially in math and engineering. In addition, Greek students have grasped the idea of the good and the beautiful, ethical virtues ingrained in their knowledge and behavior. This prepares them to face and resolve difficult technological and moral problems. It is this asset of skills and virtues that gives substance to the hopes of Kontos, that, in fact, Greeks can disarm AI: making new and useful AI products rather than products of war and technologies of unemployment, hazardous farming practices, deception, propaganda and danger. This challenge is immense.
Kontos is right saying that nothing can be done if the emigration of well-educated Greek students continues. Not only that practice must cease by offering those students a satisfying alternative in their country. But the Greek government must soon discover it should serve Greece rather than foreign powers. It should fund/create opportunities for the development and growth of AI industries for the public good in Greece. The need for “moral” AI serving the good and the beautiful is exponential.
The hazardous nature of AI
Yet I find it difficult to point to an AI product which serves the public good. Certainly this may reflect simply my limited knowledge of AI. But my hopes are merely hopes that perhaps a moral engineer might design one or more AI applications that serve the public good. The project of Kontos, AMYNTAS, question and answering system, may just do that. He is also proposing to use AI for checking the credibility of election results.
Kontos doubts that engineers can give machines consciousness. He said that computer programmers often underestimate the gigantic complexity of AI, thus writing programs that threaten energy grids, air traffic control, satellites, nuclear power plants and automobile and train safety.
I live in the US, which, along with the European Union and possibly China, Russia, India, and several other countries, is flooded with problematic, hazardous, and unnecessary AI products. For example, robots are becoming fashionable for making coffee to doing housework. If coffee shops and restaurants buy coffee robots, what happens to the waiters/workers who make coffee? AI companies are now employing human trainers / AI pilots of “an army of humanoid robots.” Meanwhile, AI companies are planning to produce “a swarm of American-built robots” for the local and international market.
Coffee-serving humanoid robots would repel me. I prefer seeing and possibly talking to beautiful waitresses. I definitely would not visit coffee shops with robots. But these coffee humanoid robots highlight the vision of their makers. They don’t like our world, especially workers who they keep firing; they want to dominate our beautiful Earth, the only star in the universe, which is alive with millions of forms of life, circling the Sun god Helios, which the Greeks worshipped for the light and life the Sun made possible. The AI plutocrats want to eliminate most of the human nature of the world we know. They want to replace it with machines and humanoid robots – hence the AI danger. I don’t want to be forced into their iron dark age.
The AI danger is so widespread that Pope Leo XIV intervened to remind Christian Americans, and “men and women of good will” the world over, they ought to rethink and resist AI. On May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas / Magnificent Humanity. This was a warning on the existential threats of Artificial Intelligence.
Pope Leo said we don’t want AI to recreate the “Babel syndrome, namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise”
“Today,” the Pope continues, “the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology [AI] that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations…. In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human…. I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty…. [However, efficiency] has spread rapidly in recent years, fueled in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology.”
Then the Platonic prose of the Pope turned to the plutocrats in charge of AI. “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few,” he warned, “it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”
Pope Leo is right. These inequalities are extremely unsettling. They undermine and almost erase democracy.
Philanthropy or misanthropy?
The plutocrats understand they are adding French Revolutionary fervor in America, especially among the thousands upon thousands of workers they have been firing. But instead of spreading their immense wealth to ameliorate poverty, they are repeating the gimmicks of the plutocrats of the past. They embrace “foundations” in order to bribe professors and journalists to sing their AI song. Foundations dish out small or large amounts of cash, buying tenuous legitimacy for hazardous AI. In 2026, the AI plutocrats are suggesting they are ready to distribute large sums.
“Philanthropy,” says David Walacce-Wells, opinion writer for the New York Times, “used to be one way that plutocrats persuaded the public of the virtue of wealth and the value of business. These days [in 2026], it seems just as likely to inspire backlash — seen by an increasingly skeptical public as an end run around not just taxation but civil society and public oversight, too.”
True, seeing members of the “overclass of philanthropists… parachuting” in the midst of hard-working and increasingly unemployed Americans and Europeans may be more than problematic, nay, unacceptable. People will have trouble identifying the new philanthropists holding the flag “of the A.I. boom, about which Americans are already — and increasingly — anxious and resentful.” No doubt about that. Most Americans understand AI is harming their children, including college students. They resent all those mega “data centers” sucking their precious fresh water, while raising the prices they pay for electricity. They also hear about the militarization of the technology killing people faster and more “efficiently.” With these thoughts in mind, why should they take seriously AI “non-profits” dolling out money? Certainly, that money could not be destined for the public good. Would you trust mafia funding a school, public library, philanthropy? Who would believe that AI funding was possibly designed to thank society for licensing it to harm society?
Human intelligence
No wonder Pope Leo XIV promised himself to remember a few virtues that safeguard “the primacy of the human person, in order to ensure that it will always be human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits.”
The Pope’s Platonic moral vision helped him to define AI technologies as mechanical: immune to human intelligence shaped by the virtues of feelings, love, anger, beauty, justice and the idea of the good, Plato’s highest virtue, which brings to life moderation (σωφροσύνη) and practical wisdom (φρόνησης). No wonder the Pope defined AI the way it really is: a soulless mechanical monster bereft of morality and intelligence, constantly fed data. Its “speech” and computing may sound logical, but they are not. They are thoughtless if often coherent and statistical machine speech and calculations that may or may not follow the human information, stories, math and human programming. The automatic voice you hear reading an article on the computer resembles human voice, but it is not. It’s a metallic voice without feelings.
Pope Leo wrote:
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”
Existential threats
On June 2, 2026, I listened to a CNN report that confirmed and summarized the Pope’s AI message. The messenger of bad news was Tristan Harris, a former Google AI executive who quit his job because he discovered that the Google executives did not have the public good in mind. In 2019, he warned that AI systems were harmful. “No one wants to contribute to a system,” he said, “in which children have poor mental health. No one wants to contribute to a system where you destabilize democracies or cause genocides across the world.” On June 2, 2026, Harris was equally certain that AI posed existential threats and dangers. In his CNN interview, he warned that AI was against democracy and humanity. Tech executives compare human lives and the energy costs required to keep those humans alive. He castigated the undemocratic politics of less than a dozen unelected businessmen gambling with the Earth and civilization, funding an arms race that affects more than eight billion humans. They feed social media, which use algorithms that disturb the mental health of millions. AI, Harris warned, speeds up these serious harmful effects. The dream or nightmare of having AI cure diseases blinds both tech executives and politicians.
Epilogue
A Greek professor, Ioannes Kontos, described the Greek origins of AI, especially from the foundation of science and logic by the fourth century BCE philosopher Aristotle. Kontos is Aristotelean. That’s why he feels so comfortable with the awesome complexities of AI. He mastered the science, logic and organization of that system. He knows it backwards and forwards. Reading his book is entering logic and advanced technology: doing things carefully, logically and methodically. The machine obeys straightforward instructions.
Kontos also investigated AI in modern Greece. The results were disappointing primarily because the Greek government serves American and other foreign interests. It did not invest in the technology, and neither did it have a prominent vision of Greece in advanced technologies. Kontos expressed concern for the misuse of AI, but he, too, advocates its war applications. The explanation is Turkey, a genocidal neighbor of Greece that still threatens it.
By 2026, AI has become a global, though extremely controversial and dangerous technology. It has become a weapon of war primarily. It guides drones, missiles and other weapons of war in their lethal trajectories. Moreover, AI may be used in the management of nuclear weapons, an extremely dangerous and existential operation. But AI also claims human skills and knowledge (talking, translation, medical diagnosis, text reading and extraction of facts from the text, and doing rapid research) that may or may not be accurate. There are other uses of AI in face recognition and recreation of human voice and behavior that are employed not for the public good but for spying and the psychological exploitation of human beings. AI in iPhones and computers may also have deceptive, delusional, sycophantic and other adverse effects on the users of those devices. The plutocrat owners of AI are trying to create a mechanical human being, which would largely replace more than workers. This has existential, political, moral and other monstrous effects on civilization and the planet. This is why Pope Leo XIV rightly denounced AI and its billionaire owners.
In contrast to this corrupt factory of AI, Greece has a history, ancient virtues, and civilization to reawaken the very advanced version of AI, which was entirely devoted to public good. To bring the Phaiakian and Homeric version of AI to life, Greece has to also return to the virtues of the Homeric Age: freedom, intelligence, moderation, practical wisdom, justice and the Platonic idea of the good and the beautiful.
Both Alexander the Great and the first president of modern Greece, Ioannes Kapodistrias, dreamed of a Sacred Hellas, an independent, neutral Greece devoted entirely to the virtues of justice, freedom, science and the good and the beautiful, a school of civilization for America, Europe and all humanity. Today’s great powers, US, the European Union, Russia, China and India, should guarantee a Sacred Hellas. For their own benefit, that of civilization and that of our Mother Earth. Sacred Hellas can come into being. It should.
