Why Nietzsche Matters in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

On the other hand, this is a pretty shallow article and does not, on my read, offer anything to anyone even vaguely familiar with technology and Nietzsche's philosophy. A more interesting integration is Nolan Gertz's Nihilism and Technology.

I think the ACM would do better to invite guest authors from philosophy departments to author a piece or coauthor a piece.

Its one of those situations where the root philosophy is correct "moral frameworks are arbitrary and thier enforcement mechanism are falling apart so we have to try something new" isn't a hard argument to justify. The problem is that it leaves "Something new" a totally blank check for anybody seeking power to fill in. To claim "This is the new natural morality".

Nietzsche is right, god is dead. But claiming to take gods place is the precursor to an apocalypse (They happen a lot more often than most people realize)

When external structures collapse (roles, labels, certainty), meaning has to be generated from within.

Identity becomes what you return to repeatedly (actions, habits, resonance), not what you’re labeled as.

Morality becomes drift-resilience — maintaining coherence when everything shifts.

Nietzsche isn’t telling us how to worship; he’s telling us how to author value in a world where external meaning no longer holds, including one shaped by AI.

IMHO, this may all be leading towards greater authenticty, but it will unfold one person at a time, as it must.

Most of his work deals with the psychological and historical origins of morality/philosophy, as well as how it might change as a result of herd dynamics. This doesn’t mean he thinks AI destroying morality or mediating it is a good thing or that some Nietzschian “ubermensch” needs to create a universal AI morality. His whole point is that morality is not universal truth but comes in flavors (master vs slave morality). He doesn’t really even think truth or egalitarianism/democracy has any inherent value (all ideas this article seems to negate).

In my opinion the biggest Nietzschian idea we can pontificate on in relation to AI is the concept of “The Last Man”, which describes Nietzsches prophesized end state of humanity in the post death-of-God era — men just want to be safe, satiated, and friendly to each other (which we are in):

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink. We have invented happiness, and they blink"

https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/perm.php?c=101&q=127

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

First, this looks like an archetypal default-tone LLM-generated article, ticking pretty much every single box in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing . And I recommend looking at this author's history, because I think they're in the habit of doing that.

But more importantly, it's such a hollow thesis that I can't believe we're seriously debating it. Why does this article exist? What does it say? Most of it says nothing at all: "However, Nietzsche’s framework, while powerful in facing cultural nihilism, does not fully address the structural nature of today’s technological crisis." / "What is needed now is a philosophical evolution: one that preserves Nietzsche’s call for inner autonomy but integrates it with systemic awareness."

And third, it's apparently published by ACM. I don't even understand what's going on anymore.

Younger people tend to have nihilistic ideas like this. And it's understandable, because it's true that the reward for being hard working, loyal, or honest is decreasing, so we think why bother trying? But the decrease of those values is just a small amount at a time. It doesn't suddenly change life from are full of joy and meaning to a complete waste of air. You can still improve a lot of things by taking small effort. Not much as it was in many ways, and yes, definitely there are someone who are born lucky or can improve a lot with far less effort than you put in. But it's still possible.

I spent a lot of time thinking like this, but slowly realized I can make my life better just by trying. That time wasn't a waste cause it made me a little bit more sympathetic to others, but some people spend their entire lives in that way. It hurts them, and it's sad they miss the chance to improve a bit. It accumulates over years and decades, and ending in an unhappy and regretful life. We can't be the full potential version of ourselves without huge effort, but can still be much happier by a small, consistent effort over time.

I spent a lot of time studying Nietzsche in college (while getting a degree in philosophy) and it is pretty annoying how the pop culture conception of his ideas has so little to do with what he actually wrote.

I think Nietzsche would find the “entrepreneurial” rebranding of his ideas to be irritating and frankly not the audience he wanted. He was writing for a very, very specific group of people, not a mass market in any sense. He doesn’t care about you losing your job because a robot took it, he is concerned with far more consequential and foundational issues. Nietzsche himself was very critical of “merchants” and technology more broadly, so I think he would find the idea of LLMs being treated as actual conscious entities to be a hilariously stupid joke, more indicative of how society’s standards have fallen than how high AI abilities have risen.

Anyway, rather than engage in a long comment on why Nietzsche would find this article annoying – I do think there is some value to be had in using AI tools as philosophical conversations.

Personally I’ve gotten a lot of value by proposing a certain book theme or argument to ChatGPT and critiquing it, exploring other books on the topic, and so on. Previously this required someone willing to sit and debate philosophical questions with you, which isn’t everyone’s favorite activity :)

Without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this AI? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This AI is the will to power—and nothing besides!

this article feels like the authors were trying to pander to those few people working in AI research telling them how crucial philosophy is "to the future of humanity". When in reality it has always been important long before AI came along and not only for AI but also for anyone working in Tech or any subject in Tech. so it is nothing more than news-jacking (or buzzword jacking) of a topic that has always been important but probably not in the isolated / cherry-picked manner that it is being done (isolating the topic to AI, or Nietzsche).

And the only thing that this article highlights if anything, is that we we should have never defunded the humanities.

Shallow because it doesn't offer anything constructive, it doesn't analize deeply Nietzsche philosophy -- which is a large topic -- neither approach the topics of the future of AI for humans, like alienation and replacement, with seriousness. So it's not only an article generated by a LLM, but behind the prompt there was a slack writer.

An LLM could ironically have written a better article.

Nietzsche wrote as the era of the landed aristocracy was ending. A society with an agrarian peasantry and an armed land-owning class can be stable for centuries. Especially with a church that tells people that this is the way things are supposed to be.

Then came industrialization, and this long stagnation came unglued over a few decades. Industrialization replaced the centrality of land ownership and tenants with the centrality of the employer and the job. This is all well known.

Now, we see society's centrality of the job declining. What does that mean? That's the question to address as AI eats into jobs.

I'm not suggesting an answer. Recycling Nietzsche probably won't help, though.

--ASZ

TFA is liberating Nietzsche from the basement hikkikomoris and selling him to programmers who want to hop on the value (creating) train

he talks of the Overman but doesn't connect it to AI or the genealogy of morals.

"thus as you are to the ape, so should the Overman be to you" -- with the idea that our morals and everything we believe, while sharing some bits with the ape, is also far different. What does an ape know about the DMV, or option calls?

So too will the AI be to us. It will practice instead of black and white morality, blue vs. orange. True AGI will either be totally alien and rage against us, a la The Terminator, or else hit a singularity and politely fuck-off a la the movie Her.

“You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.”