You might like The Just City, by Jo Walton. I was kind of ambivalent about it, but it was a reasonably fun speculative fiction about Athena gathering people from throughout time to recreate the city that Plato laid out in Republic.

To make that possible, she provides robots which can understand basic instructions and act semi-autonomously to build things, farm, etc, but fall well short of actual sapience. And after awhile, she introduces a gadfly named Socrates into the fledgling city.