As Nolan’s epic film draws crowds, Homer’s ancient journey offers a warning about meaning, power and human purpose in an age of artificial intelligence.
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” made with a reported $250 million budget, the largest of the director’s career, brings the ancient world of gods and monsters depicted in Homer’s epic to the screen with striking realism.SCREEN CAPTURE FROM UNIVERSAL PICTURES OFFICIAL TRAILER
Kim Dae-shik
The author is a professor at KAIST.
Christopher Nolan’s newest film “The Odyssey” is drawing large audiences in Korea. With its star-studded cast, compelling story and unprecedented use of 70 mm film cameras for the entire movie, it has been praised for an immersive sense of scale. Cinemas are bustling again, with IMAX screenings across Korea selling out.
Overseas, however, the film has sparked controversy. Emily Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose 2017 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” was cited by Nolan as an influence, was deeply disappointed. Homer’s Odysseus embodies both wisdom and arrogance. The poet calls him andra polytropon, a man of many turns or many faces, but Wilson argues that Nolan reduces him to a one-dimensional figure consumed by guilt over the fall of Troy.
A movie is only a movie. Hollywood cannot replace ancient Greece and Nolan is not Homer. The more important question is what a story attributed to a poet who lived roughly 2,800 years ago can mean to people facing a future in which AI may replace human work, war and invasion have again become imaginable and climate change is felt daily.
Before they were written down, stories in Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” composed around the eighth century B.C., were probably recited for generations by wandering poets. Historians have hypothesized that the Trojan War may preserve memories of conflicts involving Bronze Age cities and invading sea peoples around the 12th century B.C. In that sense, moviegoers today are watching a story rooted in the Mediterranean world of 3,200 years ago.
If “The Iliad” explores enduring human conditions — war and peace, anger and mercy — “The Odyssey” is often read as expressing the instinct to return to one’s origins, as Odysseus struggles home to Ithaca. Others see resistance to gods and fate, or the devotion of Penelope, who waits 20 years for her husband, as its central message.
The Roman philosopher Seneca, tutor to Emperor Nero, offered another interpretation. The protagonist, in his view, is neither Odysseus nor Penelope nor their son Telemachus, but the person reading the story: ourselves. Rather than investigate where Odysseus encountered storms and how long he wandered, Seneca argued, we should learn how not to wander ourselves. We are buffeted every day by storms of the mind.
What storms await us if artificial general intelligence, or AGI, capable of matching or surpassing human abilities, becomes reality rather than science fiction?
We have long imagined machines hunting humans like the Cyclops devouring Odysseus’ companions. But the real psychological challenge of AGI may look different. Imagine people who no longer need to work, living in machine-provided homes, eating machine-made food and spending their days watching videos and posting comments online. How different would they be from Odysseus’ companions after the sorceress Circe turns them into pigs?
The danger is not necessarily that machines will destroy humanity. It may be that unprecedented technological abundance gradually erodes the habits, ambitions and responsibilities that give human life meaning. A world freed from labor could offer extraordinary possibilities, but it could also leave people struggling to understand what they are for.
Meanwhile, future trillionaires who monopolize the enormous economic and scientific gains generated by AGI could tempt us, like the sirens, to surrender democracy and equality before the law. Technology that promises unprecedented prosperity could therefore create new forms of dependence and concentrations of power unless society develops the wisdom to govern it.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, continually guides Odysseus. According to myth, when the citizens of Athens sought a patron, Athena gave them the olive tree, symbolizing civilization and wisdom.
Martin Luther, who launched the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Germany, is often credited with saying that even if the world were to end tomorrow, he would plant an apple tree today — an expression of refusing to surrender to despair.
The olive tree promises lasting human prosperity founded on wisdom. The apple tree represents determination even in the face of an unavoidable end. Both images ask what human beings should preserve when confronted with forces far greater than themselves.
As we prepare to enter the age of AGI, which tree should we plant today?
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
