James Joyce, AI and Behavioural Economics

JOURNEY #22: TO THE FIRST CHATBOT AND THE FIRST NUDGE

"Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

― James Joyce's Ulysses

I came back to Ulysses recently, reading it as a behavioural scientist, and was struck by how much James Joyce got right about the world that would follow.

One chapter in particular kept pulling me back.

For a long time, the Ithaca chapter stood out as one of the strangest episodes in Ulysses, written as a catechism — composed entirely of questions and answers.

Joyce once called it the "ugly duckling" of Ulysses --unloved by many readers, yet his favourite episode. While many found the chapter dry or inhuman, Joyce found precise and mechanical. 

Today, the Ithaca chapter feels eerily familiar. Seen through a modern lens, it resembles a prolonged interaction with ChatGPT.

To see how this works, consider the opening passage of this chapter:

"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, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertance as far as the farther corner of Temple street..."  

The exchange continues: prompt, reply, prompt, reply, and on and on. The responses are exact, dull and free of emotion, and could easily have been generated by AI. 

Read today, Joyce nailed how we talk to machines a century later.

Joyce develops the first nudge 

In Ithaca, Joyce does more than experiment with form. He articulates a principle that behavioural economics would formalize a hundred years later: the nudge. 

It centres on the way Bloom convinces his wife, Molly, to carry an umbrella, even though she dislikes them.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884)

Bloom wants her to carry one not because it’s practical, but simply because he likes the image of a woman carrying an umbrella. Molly actively resists the idea. She dislikes carrying one and has no reason to change her mind. Rather than argue with her, Bloom sets things up so that carrying the umbrella makes sense to her. By buying her a new hat on a rainy day, he gives her a reason to carry the umbrella: she doesn’t want the new hat to get wet. What looks like her decision is, in fact, the result of a carefully arranged intervention that makes the desired behaviour feel natural.

Joyce names the mechanism himself: “indirect suggestion implicating self-interest.” It's hard to imagine a cleaner early description of what behavioural economists would later call a nudge. The insight is precise and modern. Behaviour changes more easily when context is reshaped than when people are reasoned with. 

Long before behavioural economics had a language for it, Joyce had already seen it—and written it into an ordinary domestic moment.

Why People Interested in Behavioural Economics should read James Joyce

I often suggest that people interested in behavioural science read James Joyce. Not only because Ulysses is extraordinary literature, but because it shows how people actually think, choose, and act. Long before behavioural economics or nudge theory Joyce was already mapping attention, desire, habit, and influence in everyday life. For anyone working in behavioural science, Ulysses isn’t an escape from the discipline — it’s a reminder of where its deepest insights began.

Joyce's character Stephen once asked: "Who ever anywhere will read these written words"? A century later the answer includes behavioural economists studying influence, those building conversational AI, and anyone trying to understand how people actually think and choose. 

Obviously, Joyce didn’t borrow from AI or behavioural economics. Both caught up to him.