The AI Odyssey: How a primal fear from the Ancient Greek world has been awakened by new technology

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has turned an old Greek warning into a very modern hit. The film opened in July, used every inch of 70mm IMAX film stock it could get, and sailed past $1 billion at the global box office. That makes it Nolan’s biggest film to date, but the money is only part of the story.

The real pull is the siren idea itself: temptation so strong that you know it could wreck you, and you still feel drawn to it. That’s the emotion many people now attach to chatbots. Not just fear of bad output. Fear of what happens when the machine makes the hard part easier — and you start wondering whether you can still do the work without it.

That anxiety has older roots than AI. Socrates worried that writing would weaken memory. Later, Johannes Trithemius railed against printed books and defended handwritten codices. Decades later, calculators sparked a backlash in classrooms, and some research backed the critics up by showing that heavy early use could weaken mental fluency and fact recall.

The current debate, though, is sharper because AI reaches into reasoning, synthesis and judgment, not just storage or calculation. The Financial Times newsletter The AI Shift pointed to research by José Azar, Mireia Giné and Javier Sanz-Espín showing that highly exposed jobs are not disappearing on paper, but wages in those roles are falling and workers are less likely to move. The split may not be between jobs that survive and jobs that vanish. It may be between people who evaluate and people who just execute.

The Greek word for the problem is akrasia: knowing better and doing the shortcut anyway. Aristotle treated it as a spectrum, something you can move along through repetition, for better or worse. That fits AI unnervingly well. Some people use it like a tutor and keep practicing. Others take the first draft, call it work, and feel the old pull toward the easy path.

OPINION: The real AI divide is not believers versus skeptics. It’s people who still want to do the thinking versus people who’ve already decided the machine can do enough of it. That’s why all the hand-wringing about “productivity” misses the point; the issue is character, and software has a nasty habit of revealing who’s happy to outsource that too.