JOURNEY #21: TO THE FIRST CHATGPT AND THE FIRST NUDGE
"Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"
― James Joyce's Ulysses
It's been a dozen years since my last post here. In that time I've changed professions, changed how I see the world and changed the questions I ask. Today I'm a behavioural economist. A title that Joyce might never have imagined, though I suspect he would have understood it perfectly.
Re-reading Ulysses, I'm struck by how much of our modern world Joyce foresaw. In Ithaca, the penultimate episode, the style becomes a pure exchange of questions and answer: precise, procedural, stripped of sentiment.
"What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?"
"Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford Place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy Square, west: then, south, circularly, by Temple street, Gardiner's place, Eccles street."
Prompt. Response. Logic without emotion. Joyce anticipated the rhythm of AI long before it existed. The "AI" responds with an over-detailed list of routes, commas standing in for coordinates. Exact, mechanical and free of judgement. The answer could have been generated by Google Maps.
Joyce captured the cadence of machine intelligence describing 1904 Dublin with the precision of 2025 AI.
And then there's the excerpt from Ithaca that seems to anticipate behavioural economics:
"What system had proved more effective?"
"Indirect suggestion implicating self-interest."
"Example?"
"She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat."
This isn’t a literary flourish. It’s the first recorded nudge. Long before behavioural economics gave it a name, Joyce captured the principle itself: behaviour changes more easily when desire is redirected than when it’s resisted. Bloom doesn’t argue or coerce; he reshapes context so that someone else’s choice becomes her own idea.
That small exchange contains everything the modern discipline would later exemplify: choice architecture, incentive alignment, gentle influence. It’s as if Joyce foresaw the behavioural map of the next century and tucked it into a domestic metaphor.
So my journey with James Joyce continues—between data and desire, between the first chatbot and the first nudge. Joyce got there first. The rest of us are still catching up.
