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

The myth of the sirens’ call has been with us for thousands of years, most recently brought to life in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey .

They’re a supernatural creature whose call is so enticing that it sends men to their doom—but the phrase has become a stand-in for that thing you know you shouldn’t do, but you simply can’t resist.

Odysseus ended up lashing himself to the mast and ordering his crew to plug their ears with wax.

When he heard the sirens’ call, though, he screamed to be released and begged his men to let him go.

The man who’d spent 10 years outwitting gods didn’t trust himself for 30 seconds within earshot of a sound he knew would destroy him.

That specific kind of dread—the fear of what you might do if the temptation were real—is older than the internet, older than AI, older than any technology that has ever been accused of making us weaker.

It was a key plot line in the Iliad and The Odyssey, and centuries later, became the central problem of Greek philosophy, the thing the Stoics spent their lives trying to solve.

And it is the same thing a large and quietly growing number of people feel every time they open a chatbot; why they hate the technology without using it, and want to bring to a screeching halt the data centers driving the biggest economic boom in at least a century.

It’s the fear about how you can’t help yourself, that you’re not good enough or smart enough; that when an easy, even potentially destructive solution lies in front of you, you won’t be strong enough to resist the call of the sirens.

Socrates had the same fear about the act of writing, scribes had the same fear about Gutenberg’s printing press, and John Saxon had the same fear about the calculator.

But AI concentrates all of these fears in a place beyond the act of writing, printing or calculating to the very act of thinking itself.

Seen in this light, The Odyssey ‘s billion-dollar success isn’t an accident for times like these.

The fear underneath the data People who secretly use AI at work and describe it as “cheating” aren’t worried about their boss finding out.

The word surfaces because some part of them is already asking a different question: if this were taken away tomorrow, would I still be good at my job? Would I still be smart? Everyone knows the name for this: impostor syndrome, the persistent, private fear of being exposed as less capable than everyone believes.