Mechanical men and artificial beings appear in Greek myths , such as the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion 's Galatea . In the Middle Ages , there was rumors of secret mystical or alchemical means of placing mind into matter , such as Jābir ibn Hayyān 's Takwin , Paracelsus ' homunculus and Rabbi Judah Loew 's Golem . By the 19th century , ideas about artificial men and thinking machines was developed in fiction , as in Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein or Karel Čapek 's R.U.R. ( Rossum 's Universal Robots ) , and speculation , such as Samuel Butler 's " Darwin among the Machines . " AI have continued to be an important element of science fiction into the present .