The Digital Odyssey

From Nymph Goddesses to Chatbots

In The Odyssey, Homer recounts a number of obstacles faced by Odysseus during his homeward travels. On one level, Homer’s Odyssey follows the traditional pattern of the hero’s journey, with similarities to the trials of Hercules. But there is something peculiar about some of the challenges Odysseus faces. Whereas the labors of Hercules involve overcoming danger, some of Odysseus’s most perilous challenges involve overcoming comfort.

At the island of the Lotus Eaters, Odysseus and his crew encounter the temptation to live out a life of bliss without ever enduring discomfort again. Similarly, when voyaging near the isle of the Sirens, Odysseus faces the temptation to be lured to inaction through beautiful music. The sorceress Circe invites him to live with her forever in continual feasting and love, and the goddess nymph Calypso offers him an immortal life free from suffering and pain.

These obstacles gain significance in light of Odysseus’s quest, which is not simply to return to his homeland of Ithaca, but also to reunite with his human wife, Penelope. The temptations offer Odysseus opportunities to enter into relationships with various women who are not Penelope. But it goes beyond that: it isn’t simply that Circe and Calypso are not Penelope; rather, as goddesses, they represent a qualitatively different kind of woman, one that can offer a relationship without the hardship and struggles awaiting Odysseus back home.

On Calypso’s island, the nymph explicitly frames Odysseus’s choice in these terms. She offers him the choice to either live the life of an immortal with her, untroubled by hardship, need, and the specter of death, or to return to Penelope, a mere mortal who, even by Odysseus’s admission, cannot match Calypso in beauty. From Calypso’s perspective, it seems perfectly rational that Odysseus would want to transcend his human nature, together with its associated fragility and suffering. As a goddess, she cannot understand why Odysseus would eschew utopia with her for a life with Penelope and its travel hazards, battles, aging, and, ultimately, death.

Odysseus recognizes what is at stake when he turns from the path of the gods represented by Calypso and embraces the path of the human, as represented by Penelope. “I know the truth of everything you say,” he tells Calypso, yet,

. . . my desire and longing day by day is still to reach my own home and to see the day of my return. And if this or that divinity should shatter my craft on the wine-dark ocean, I will beat it and keep a bold heart within me. Often enough before this time have war and wave oppressed and plagued me; let new tribulations join the old.

Odysseus chooses to pursue distinctively human virtues, including those that are inextricably linked to the vulnerability of mortal human experience and love. And that is what is ennobling about his story. With the fragility, limitation, pain, and vulnerability of human experience come the courage, beauty, and values that give human experience its richness. Odysseus realizes this, for he knows that to become invulnerable like the gods would be to abandon all that makes human experience truly worth living. 

 Digital Calypsos

Suppose Odysseus had turned away from the struggle of human love to accept the goddess’s invitation to have a “perfect” relationship with her. That is, in fact, the course many young men are choosing today. With the proliferation of AI girlfriends, it becomes possible to turn from the weakness and vulnerability of human women to the apparent ease and comfort of a virtual goddess.

I use the word “goddess” deliberately. The problem with AI girlfriends is not simply that they aren’t real; rather, they represent a different kind of relationship with a different kind of entity, which is best viewed through the lens of the goddess archetype. I do not mean that behind romantic chatbots or sexual robots are spiritual beings; rather, these entities —whether purely cloud-based algorithms or three-dimensional robots —offer frictionless succor: comfort without effort, reward without labor, connection without courage, and intimacy without self-donation and sacrifice.

Significantly, the adverts for AI girlfriends and sexbots tempt young men with features eerily similar to Calypso’s. These “women,” we are told, never grow old, remain predictable, and eliminate the discomfort and struggle that are a part of the human-relationship experience. In fact, the sites selling romantic chatbots all but promise to deliver the perfection of a demigod. As Liberty Vittert reported in The Hill, “apps have created virtual girlfriends that talk to you, love you, allow you to live out your erotic fantasies, and learn, through data, exactly what you like and what you don’t like, creating the ‘perfect’ relationship.”

One site advertises its product by saying that its AI companion, named Joi, will understand you immediately without any work (sorry, human women) and will be continually refined to better offer romantic deliverables:

Imagine an AI who understands your desires, engages with your fantasies, and transforms every conversation into an intimate experience. Welcome to the world of Joi, your AI girlfriend. . . . Joi learns from your interactions, continuously evolving to better align with your preferences, ensuring the ultimate personalized experience while prioritizing your privacy. She understands your needs, respects your boundaries, and promises to deliver conversations that are engaging and deeply satisfying. Discover a whole new realm of AI companionship with Joi.

We should not dismiss this as merely exaggerated advertising, though on one level of course it is. On another level, the makers of Joi and similar products are marketing a way for users to transcend the vulnerability and mortality of embodied existence. In practice, they are offering a type of quasi-divinity. Of course, this is a cheat; within Homer’s imaginative world, Odysseus really would have become immortal if he had stayed with Calypso, but a man living in his mother’s basement talking with an AI girlfriend will never transcend his mortality. AI girlfriends offer the illusion of immortality through the false promises of love without vulnerability and intimate connection without the possibility of loss, pain, or aging (these bots only grow old if you tell them to). But in the end, theirs is the promise of the Lotus Eaters, luring the man in his mother’s basement into the acedia of complete indifference to the real world.

Intimacy with Machines

Over a decade ago, Sherry Turkle amassed an impressive array of research, including years of interviews, which suggested that we are “remak[ing] ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines.” In her compelling yet disturbing narrative, to have robots as lovers is the natural next step following the psychological training we are already receiving from our digital connections:

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

In Turkle’s analysis, trends that began with online social networks may culminate in widespread willingness to embrace (literally) robots as lovers and companions:

Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want them. . . . These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

Turkle quotes sixty-four-year-old Wesley, who reflects a growing contingent of men who prefer robots over real people. “I’d want from the robot a lot of what I want from a woman,” Wesley commented, adding,

but I think the robot would give me more in some ways. With a woman, there are her needs to consider. . . . That’s the trouble I get into. If someone loves me, they care about my ups and downs. And that’s so much pressure.

This type of love-in-the-digital-comfort-zone now seems within reach. Imagine having a relationship with a humanoid that, because it is connected to all your online activity, knows exactly what you need to hear and when, exactly what type of sex you want, and just what to say and when to say it. Imagine if the apparent needs of your robot lover are simply a projection of your own ego. Although that may sound deeply dehumanizing, it is a state of affairs that many welcome, and one which is on the cusp of being delivered on a massive scale.

Liberation From Embodiment

If the first sexual revolution was about having “free sex,” the second sexual revolution is about removing the vulnerability of romantic relationships and doing everything from the safety of a digital comfort zone. If the Pill facilitated the former, the algorithm facilitates the latter. Yet paradoxically we are finding that to fully achieve this kind of customized intimacy, one must embrace a narrative which problematizes the body.

Liberation from physical presence has been a theme from the early stages of the digital sexual revolution. Not long ago, teen magazines heralded “sexting” (sending revealing pictures of yourself) as a way to avoid the difficult aspects of being human while still harvesting some of the thrills of intimacy. An article in Sans Magazine was exuberant about sexting’s potential to free sexual relationships from the constraints that come with physical presence:

No longer do we actually have to commit to a single task of actually physically undressing, warming up our partner and then engaging in the carnal act of intercourse. . . . Plus, we don’t ever have to actually see the person.

The author went on to point out that sexting enables a girl to experience the excitement of giving her body to a man without ever having to approach him in all her vulnerability, fragility, and humanness. Though it may seem odd, for many, this was precisely the appeal of sexting. Sexting was thus seen as a way to liberate sex from the problem that has dogged it from the beginning: having to deal with real people. Notice that the subtext here is that our embodiment in time and space represents a type of fall from which technology can redeem us.

It isn’t just sexting that implicitly drew on the narrative of fall and redemption. As far back as 1997, Douglas Groothuis warned that the internet’s ability to deny both the user’s body and identity was creating a milieu in which salvation was increasingly conceived in gnostic terms, with technology offering new ways to be freed from the constraints of real life, including the limitations intrinsic to being human. “The self seems especially protean and plastic,” Groothuis observed, “when largely removed from the envelopments of real-life interaction with other human beings.” It may feel more free, but Groothuis warned that freeing our relationships from the constraints of embodiment comes at a cost: “There is a dimension of intimacy and accountability that comes from face-to-face, person-to-person encounter that is not available otherwise.”

Groothuis is correct. Without physical human presence, the very experiences that contribute to a meaningful relationship are not possible. In real-time interaction with other human beings, it is precisely our embodiment in time and space that enables us to attend sympathetically to another, to see things from another person’s point of view, and to offer the gift of attentiveness. After all, it is in the body that our face can say what words cannot, that we smile, cry, blush, and offer a reassuring touch. But it is also in the body that we are confronted with one another’s vulnerability and fragility. 

The lure of artificial relationships —or even real-world relationships in which the majority of communication occurs through texting —is that we can act as if we are disembodied and thereby suspend the finitude of our body. Through our digital devices we can act and respond to others as if we are not bound by space. We may think we can dispense with the physical element and still expect to have our social cravings satisfied. But, of course, artificial relationships can never deliver; they merely lead to more loneliness. In a relationship invulnerable to pain and loss, there can be no true self-donation, and thus no true intimacy.

In the case of online communication, including sexting, there were still real people at the other end of the device. To be truly liberated from embodiment, the person at the other end must finally be dispensed with, replaced by the nonhuman “perfection” of the machine. As algorithms are “incarnated” in three-dimensional sex-bots, one might argue that the physical body returns in a sense. Yet in reality, the progression from chatbot lovers to three-dimensional sexbots represents the final triumph of body hatred. These entities may be tactile, but insofar as they are controlled by algorithms unencumbered by time and space, they represent a turn away from the true meaning of materiality. These robots are, in fact, a surrogate physicality that offers the illusion of perfection through promising to clean up the messiness of flesh-and-blood relationships.

Leaning Into Tribulation

The Greeks seemed to recognize that the very limitations that make humans vulnerable also make them lovable. When their gods fell in love, it was frequently with human beings, as if to underscore that human weakness is part of what makes us attractive and beautiful. Thus, the Olympians often descended from their pristine heavenly existence to pursue a love mediated through imperfection, weakness, and risk. Even with Calypso, the virtues that must have made Odysseus so attractive to her were those that the hero forged in the fires of hardship, battle, struggle, and human vulnerability. In loving Odysseus, Calypso herself became vulnerable, as she experienced the pain of unrequited love.

This mythos of gods condescending to the level of human weakness finds its greatest expression in the Incarnation, where the Creator God embraced the vulnerability of human life and finally the pain of human death. In the revelation of God in Christ, we confront a truth that was only partially glimpsed in the tradition of Greek mythology, namely that the highest form of love is one that is mediated through weakness, vulnerability, and pain. 

Odysseus understood this. He knew that even though he could have stopped at numerous points in his journey to live the remainder of his life in comfort, his human vocation required something very different; it required leaning into struggle and embracing suffering, as he declared: “Let new tribulations join the old.”