The wish to construct machines that can perform tasks just like us or better than us is as old as our ability to reason about the world and question how things work.
In the Iliad, when Thetis goes to ask Hephaestus for replacement armor for her son Achilles, Homer describes Hephaestus’s lab as a veritable den of robotics. There are machines on tripods whose task is to attend meetings of the gods (yes, even the gods hated going to meetings themselves), robotic voice-controlled assembly lines, and robots made out of gold to help their master.
They were made of gold but looked like real girls ...
