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Earthy Intelligence: the Odyssey in the age of AI 

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Sophie: So welcome to the Mayvin Podcast. This is a short podcast this time to introduce Mayvin's field notes on AI. So notes from the field of what actually implementing AI looks, sounds, feels like from the inside, the unvarnished truth. - 

I hear a lot that AI is just a tool. Just use it like a tool. You can pick it up, you can put it down you're in control. And that is to some extent true, and also it's only a very small part of the story because AI is also changing the way we think, the way we see the world, the lens through which we look at the world. 

According to Dion Fortune, who was, a Western occultist in the 20th century, magic is the art of causing [00:01:00] changes in consciousness in conformity with will. So changing consciousness at will 

AI as Magic 

Sophie: And by that definition, AI is not just a tool, it's magic. Josh Schrei borrowed this idea for his podcast on AI, which is definitely worth a listen, and his point is that we're letting the unreal guide the real to the point that it influences every aspect of our lives. So we've built this thing, this magic, but we built it with none of the rigor, the discipline, the initiation, the taboo to navigate and use this magic in a way that serves humanity and the planet. 

 I think there might be some real profound benefit in thinking about what one of our oldest technologies we have, storytelling, has to offer us in relation to one of our newest [00:02:00] technologies, aI. There's a reason at the moment why epics and myth are coming back into, p- popular consciousness, most notably by the recent film by Christopher Nolan of The Odyssey. 

These stories aren't things that just happened a long time ago. They locate us, our small human-sized lives inside a much larger universe amongst much bigger energies and powers. As Martin Shaw would put it, they're a wild way of telling the truth. There's a pull towards these old stories to putting us back into relationship, right relationship with the world around us. 

So let me talk to you about one of those epics, which as I've already mentioned, is quite resonant in popular culture at the moment, is The Odyssey and what I think it tells us about the place of AI in our organizations at the moment. 

Polytropos & Metis 

Sophie: The first thing we hear about [00:03:00] Odysseus in this epic is not his name. Far before we hear his name, we hear that he is polytropos, which means a man of many turns, of many roads, many shapes. 

Odysseus isn't a hero who comes back and saves all his men. He comes back with nothing, and he's lost all his men on the way. He's definitely not a hero figure. A trickster, and he's trying and failing to navigate this world over and over again. 

There's one word that's really important to Odysseus and the trickster in in ancient Greek, which is the word metis 

It means cunning intelligence. So it's practical, it's situated. It's very different from the word wisdom. It's the intelligence of a nav-navigator reading a sea she's read a thousand times. it's the intelligence of a midwife. 

It's an earthy [00:04:00] intelligence 

It's definitively not the intelligence of AI which can be quantified, written down, generalized, exported, because it's the knowledge that only exists in contact with the particular. 

The other thing about tricksters is that they know what they want. They're led by their desire by their appetites 

And that's what makes this figure kind of dangerous and creative. 

Because Odysseus really knows what he wants. When he's offered immortality by Calypso to stay with her, he says no because he doesn't want that. What he wants is very clear. It's rocky Ithaca and Penelope, his wife. And h- even knowing and accepting that Penelope is lesser than Calypso, he still wants that. 

So not only does he have desire, he has a human-sized desire. He's not trying to transcend anything. And when we use [00:05:00] AI 

If you don't know what you want, if you don't have clarity about what you're asking for, which often is the hardest thing, which often we don't know what we want and what we need, and our organizations have a lot of trouble working that out as well. We just end up amplifying our own con-confusion with AI faster and at volume, with citations 

The Sirens 

Sophie: Which takes us to the most famous scene of the epic. And the one that often people remember wrongly. It's the sirens, and when people think of the sirens, they think of this beauty entrancing the sailors to come and be dashed against the rocks and drown. The sirens were not singing a love song. Homer never tells us what they look like. What they're offering is omniscience, total knowledge instantly without the work. They say, "We know all things that come to pass upon the [00:06:00] fruitful earth So does that sound familiar? 

 Just because we are endlessly offered ideas, content, stuff to fill our heads does not mean we have to accept it. 

What Odysseus does, is tell his crew to put wax in their ears so they don't hear the sirens, and then they tie him to the mast without so he can hear them So what he's doing here, he's not choosing ignorance, and he's not choosing to swallow everything. He is choosing freedom within constraint. 

Limits are what makes his exposure survivable, and he decides in advance, right? So where are we putting limits for ourselves? Where is our discipline? What are we tying ourselves to when we start engaging with AI? 

The Oar 

Sophie: And then there's the oar. [00:07:00] So this is really interesting. I love this bit, and people don't really talk about this part of the poem. But Tiresias the, the prophet from the underworld, tells Odysseus how his story eventually ends, and this is the ending that goes beyond the end of the poem. 

He tells him that at some point he has to take an oar, walk inland, and keep walking until he reaches people who know nothing of the sea, who don't salt their food, and who don't recognize the thing on his shoulder as an oar. They recognize it as a winnowing fan, a tool for throwing grain into the air. 

Odysseus will then plant it, and there he will find peace. 

So meaning is contextual. Entirely. And so is this technology. AI means vastly different things for different people and for different sectors depending on where you are and what you're doing. Not only do we need to be a bit trickstery, this [00:08:00] technology is a trickster technology. 

The people who created it don't know what it can do we only know once we start using it and we see how far we go and how deep we can get with it. 

So how far do we have to carry this thing of AI before we can put it down and see it for something maybe different than what we're projecting onto it? 

Penelope 

Sophie: Which brings us to Penelope. Three years Penelope's weaving by day and unpicking by night. And what she's weaving, she tells the suitors, is the shroud of Laertes, who's the father of Odysseus. So here's the previous order. It's a symbol of the old age.  

And she's holding it open. Despite the suitors pushing her towards a conclusion 

Sam Altman of OpenAI gave an interview very recently talking about how he'd been wrong about the [00:09:00] speed of AI and how it was gonna impact the economy and society. And his words were that the economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. 

And then he says, "I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I'm grateful for it." 

So you could see this as inertia, his words, inertia. You could also see this as a way of holding this question open, not forcing a premature closure. A lot of the firms that were the first movers on AI and people lost a lot of jobs by adopting AI quickly, actually had to reverse those decisions because they didn't understand the meaning of AI and what that could do for them and what it meant in their context. 

And actually, frontline workers are the ones with the metis the practical wisdom to [00:10:00] apply this technology in the best way. 

This is problematic, right? Because Penelope is not a figure who feels like she has much power. Her power is in her refusal. 

But on the other hand, she has a huge amount of power. Everybody's waiting around for her to make a decision. The fate of Ithaca depends on her. Why she has the power, to decide the next king of Ithaca is not quite clear. 

So her power is ambiguous, and what's also ambiguous, unlike Odysseus, is what she really wants. It's not clear 

So my suggestion here is that we don't know what we want, and we don't quite know what our power is in relation to AI yet So how do we find out? That's an invitation to weave and unpick Until we make something new that's ours 

And the final thing 

Nostos: Coming Home 

Sophie: The Odyssey is not a hero's journey. That was the Iliad. So the hero's journey is a journey for the first half of life. It's going out, it's having an adventure, [00:11:00] it's being heroic. The Odyssey is the homecoming, the nostos in ancient Greek. nostos is not just about homecoming. There's also implicit in it a deep ache, a deep longing for home, navigating deep loss, reclaiming identity. 

The poem is known for all the adventures that Odysseus has, but actually he rocks up on Ithaca in Book 13. The poem's only 24 books, so more than half of the poem is his arrival, and it's not fun. He doesn't recognize it when he first comes. 

He's a beggar. He is dismissed. It is dangerous, and that's put into sharp relief by the frequent references to Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek Army who is murdered when he arrives home. 

In the way that AI does the things we thought we were special for doing, it asks of us quite an uncomfortable question [00:12:00] about what our real value is, who we are in this world? And letting go of the busyness and the doing is uncomfortable. That coming home to ourselves, finding a new identity for ourselves is deeply uncomfortable. 

And you can see that in the discomfort people have with AI and not quite recognizing themselves, feeling like beggars. Having to remake relationships all the time, as Odysseus does with his son, with his father, with his wife, one by one. It's painstaking. 

So part of this story we're in at the moment is not about a heroic adventure where we're seeking to transcend, , in these techno dreams Odysseus chooses to come home. To engage with things as they are in their imperfection. 

And it's not about imagining a better future or [00:13:00] planning for however we're gonna fix everything. It's about inhabiting the world differently by creating, embodying a different future in the now in lots of small imperfect ways. 

Field Notes Preview 

Sophie: So that gives you a bit of a taste of some of the themes we're gonna be talking about in Field Notes. And rather than wait until we've got it all sorted and we can give you our version of a Hollywood film, we're gonna give you something a little bit more messy and trickstery. 

Coming soon to a podcast near you. And please do let us know if there's anything you'd like us in particular to touch on, and tell us of your own field notes as well . We'd love to hear more .