The story of a Monkey's Paw or Pandora's Box is an archetype as old as storytelling. The moral is always, don't mess with powerful stuff you don't understand. Curiosity killed the cat.
Certainly this applies to AI... but was there equivalent dangerous knowledge or tech which existed back in ye olden days that spawned such tales to begin with?
Look at the parable of Icarus, a story of ambition and greed. But it seems very likely to be somewhat based on people experimenting with flying and learning about gravity the hard way. Not that they ever got close to the sun.