I'm so torn about this article. On the one hand, it's great to see technologists engaging more with philosophy—arguably the technological landscape we currently have would h ave been much better if they had done so more deeply and more frequently.
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.
I hate to be the one to say this, but this article reads as though it was written by an LLM. The shallowness is one reason. Another is the lack of any individual voice that would suggest a human author.
And there are the unsupported citations and references:
The sentence “The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs report estimates 83 million jobs may be displaced globally, disproportionately affecting low- and mid-skill workers” is followed by a citation to a book published in 1989.
Footnote 7 follows a paragraph about Nietzsche’s philosophy. That footnote leads to a 2016 paper titled “The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate” [1], which makes no reference to Nietzsche, nihilism, or the will to power.
Footnote 2 follows the sentence “Ironically, as people grow more reliant on AI-driven systems in everyday life, many report heightened feelings of loneliness, alienation, and disconnection.” It links to the WEF’s “Future of Jobs Report 2023” [2]. While I haven’t read that full report, the words “loneliness,” “alienation,” and “disconnection” yield no hits in a search of the report PDF.
A positive outcome of LLMs. Regardless if the specific article is AI generated or not, we become increasingly intolerant of shallowness. While in the past we would engage with the token effort of the source, we now draw conclusions and avoid the engagement much faster. I am expecting the quality of real articles to improve to avoid the more sensitive reader filters.
I'm a member of the ACM, so I would report this article.
However, I think the author may just have made some mistakes and mixed up/-1'd their references, since the 2023 report is actually #2
2. Di Battista, A., Grayling, S., Hasselaar, E., Leopold, T., Li, R., Rayner, M. and Zahidi, S., 2023, November. Future of jobs report 2023. In World Economic Forum (pp. 978-2).
Similarly, Footnote 7 probably should probably point to #8
8. Nietzsche, F. and Hollingdale, R.J., 2020. Thus spoke zarathustra. In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (pp. 461-466). Routledge.
At this point I regularly see front-page HN articles that are LLM written (amusingly sometimes accompanied by comments praising how much of a breath of fresh air the article is compared to usual "LLM slop").
I worry about when I no longer see such articles (as that means I can no longer detect them), which likely will be soon enough.
>But passive nihilism is also leading us to see in technologies a way to become sicker humans, humans who are trapped in an endless cycle of never being satisfied with how much “better” we have become. In other words, passive nihilism is leading us toward active nihilism, toward being able to question if we know what “better” means; to question if we know what purpose such betterment is meant to serve; to question whether we are trying to become better only for the sake of being better, for the sake of being different, for the sake of not being who we are; to question whether our pursuit of the posthuman is leading us to risk becoming inhuman because of our nihilistic desire to be anything other than merely human. It is through exploring such questions that we can destroy in order to create, in order to create new values, new goals, and new perspectives on the relationship between human progress and technological progress.
TFA (charitably): they're exploring one such question, they're at least trying to gerrymander Nietzsche's "inventing value" with the Millennial trope "creating value"
I didn't read anything about a connection between technology and philosophy. Its more about finding meaning in a world that has been over technologised.
Shallow article that could have easily been generated by a LLM. Yes, seriously "Please write an article about revisiting Nietzsche in the Age of AI", something on this tone.
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.
Very generic weak article, as many others have said.
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 :)
> 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.
You don't need to, and certainly there is a rich history of interpreting Nietzsche in various ways to fit various philosophical programs.
But still, when the interpretation is so dumbed down and over-simplified, I think it becomes a bit insulting to the original writer. Even moreso when the interpretation quite clearly isn't familiar with the original context/meaning of the work, which is almost always the case when it comes to Nietzsche in pop culture.
The article is a prime example: the author clearly didn't read much more than the Wikipedia page. This is typical of popular writing/content (especially on YouTube) about Nietzsche.
I guess we could argue about its validity as "an interpretation of Nietzsche", but I mostly think it's just unremarkable, low effort writing. There is absolutely an article that could be written about Nietzsche's philosophy applied to the modern AI situation...but this isn't it.
That's philosophy just in general though. It's to a very large degree the study of excerpts, and commentaries excerpts, and commentaries on commentaries.
There are people with a degree in philosophy that think Plato's republic was an attempt at designing the ideal state, because they've only seen the middle of the dialogue, and were never shown the beginning and end where the republic is very explicitly introduced as a philosophical device to examine the virtue of justice in the soul.
> But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?
Because we're reading an article titled "Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence": the author ought then to know what he's talking about.
This is reasonably common with all pop writers about any philosopher, but it's nearly ubiquitous for Nietzsche. For a long time, I found this baffling. You can understand why someone might be confused about what Heidegger or Kant meant about something. Nietzsche writes very clearly and simply. This led me to realize that after a certain point, understanding has much less to do with cognitive capability and more to do with your emotional background and prejudices, something akin to what Nietzsche called the "intellectual conscience." I no longer actually read any article on any popular website about Nietzsche because you can be sure they don't have anything interesting to say; they don't understand the guy they're talking about.
Nietzsche is brilliant and the best thing he did was to inspire other people to their own thoughts. That is what was needed then and needed now, and at all times. The article didn't share much insight but glad to see him talked about, if only because it gives us permission to talk about deep things. Everybody should embrace their role as philosopher, take it seriously, and develop themselves- and through that, prompt others to do so as well.
Whoever wrote this article probably has little more than a cursory or highly aesthetecized understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It feels like they just related his idea of value-creation to a bunch of pre-conceived purportedly “bad things” like lack of social cohesion.
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"
I agree, I think that AI is not some “new” thing - we’ve had machines for a long time, and we just so happened to invent really good ones. Similar to how the machine of the Industrial Revolution laid waste to the social order of the landed aristocracy and what you might call “late stage feudalism”, so too does AI destabilize and outmode the core mythos of our time. We’re rapidly shedding an illusion of a world of free and equal, yet fundamentally different men who must learn to work together by technocratically solving issues that Capital (the machine) fails to solve. As Capital approaches its logical zenith (becoming machine incarnate), it finds fewer and fewer uses for these Last Men in the making. AI is the final stage of enlightenment thought, enabling its promises: an abolishment of differénce, a homogeneous civilization, an order which maintains equality by stripping individual freedoms.
> men just want to be safe, satiated, and friendly to each other
I would argue AI fundamentally changes nothing in this respect. I think what we all want is freedom of pursuit, which is afforded to all as a birthright. What we are so concerned with is everyone's starting lines, and those starting lines are the consequence of an unjust society. Rand said it best in The Fountainhead:
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
It appears that the author has struggled to put Nietzsche and AI together and derive some interaction and conclusion. There is no need for doing that. I don't see an interaction there. Sounds very hollow and shallow and a bit synthetic.
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.
>Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths. Far away from the market-place and from fame happens all that is great: far away from the market-place and from fame have always dwelt the creators of new values.
--ASZ
TFA is liberating Nietzsche from the basement hikkikomoris and selling him to programmers who want to hop on the value (creating) train
The article is terrible, but the topic is an interesting one. Nietzschean AI wouldn't be a bunch of dead weights, it would be living, growing, "becoming". It would also not be a blank slate that learns from human rewards or labels, but have it's own innate "rewards". It would do things because it wants to, without the need for justifications.
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!
Funny, some philosophers which wrote about how technology and AI are going to replace humanity - Deleuze & Guatarri, and Nick Land trace their thinking back to Nietzche, saying that "will to power" and "becoming" is exactly how AI takes shape and incorporates itself.
The history of Nietzsche's work and the context it was used in makes this conversation complicated.
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)
You'd have a hard time justifying the argument that moral frameworks are arbitrary. First, they have complicated internal structures that aren't well understood even today. See, e.g., the various "paradoxes" of modal logics used in ethics. Second, since we're all the same social primate species, moral rules are surprisingly consistent globally. Third, the Romantic and anti-Enlightenment streams that Nietzsche was a part of generally did away with the need to justify claims. This vibe-based approach is a big part of why people like Nietzsche are sometimes viewed more as literary figures than philosophers.
Nietzsche was very strongly in favor of the aristocracy and opposed to democracy. Traditional mass market religion was always something the ruling class saw as beneath them. For a long time the ruling class was the priestly class, so they literally made the rules of religion. That was no longer true in Nietzsche's day, but his views on morality are still influenced by the fact that he's writing motivational works for the ruling class.
It's just not interesting, its not really foundational, it weirdly adopts the value frame of what it rejects, its arrogant, much of it is trivially false.
It's like hearing someone talking about reading Von Mises or Ayn Rand or Myers Briggs types for the first time.
It's like, I'm too old and well informed now to find any of them interesting or of value, maybe they're a developmental phase and are ok if you don't get stuck in them.
Read them sure, but if you're the type of person who believes what they read and can't engage with it critically your better off reading more substantive and true works, like cheaper by the dozen or the boxcar children, or the musicians of brennan or read more interesting, modern, informed work like Wheeler.
Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who did a good job of identifying a major problem of their time. Then he went on to propose a solution, which didn't work out. (The same could be said of Marx, who was also active in the middle of the 19th century. The two apparently never met.)
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.
AI breaks old sources of meaning the same way Nietzsche said the death of God broke inherited morality.
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.
Nietzsche says, without irony, all a basement dweller needs to pay attention to is doing world class shit!
(Medication, internet connection, etc may or may not be required-- from my reading, N's opinion is that getting used to virtuosity takes time and isolation-- drinking from the firehose wastes a lot of organs. I disagree, debate me! )
Anything of any value always takes one person at a time for things to really get better. Good article btw. I am working on a Science Fiction story about this kind of future. These concepts are a big help.
AI doesn't break any sources of meaning, it's value is in replacing journalists as middle man to access decades of silod research with more granularity.
I used to think the democratization of content creation and reach was an obvious virtue.
Now I think instead of massive corporations making shit up to sell stuff as some great way of life, we have every single Susan and Billy doing it constantly across every interaction.
it's worse. it doesn't make the former good. but we've somehow created a worse version.
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.
It's sad that many nihilists think like that life is meaningless, there's no point in trying.
Nihilism suggests our lives don't have inherent purposes defined by religion or culture.
That means we can define our own purposes and values of lives, not by following a god packaged with harmful commandments.
Many people feel fulfilled when they notice small improvements or helping others for tiny things, and they're grateful for that.
You can simply appreciate those feelings instead of being sarcastic.
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.
The obvious problem with nihilism is that ultimately everything is ungrounded and there are no moral truths. Some people are naturally altruistic and feel fulfilled when helping others, others are naturally sadistic and feel fulfilled when torturing others. Nihilism means these are fundamentally equal impulses.
This is why humans invented various religious systems and philosophies to provide grounding for absolute moral beliefs. There's also probably an evolutionary factor at work, where nihilistic societies imploded or were outcompeted by confident cultures which believed absolute moralities. This is being seen today in Europe, with nihilistic progressives having few children, supporting mass migration, resulting in being demographically replaced by absolutist muslims.
Yes, there are people who are sadistic but still fear divine punishment like karma or hell.
And religion may be the best way to force them to stop harming others.
But our society prioritise freedom.
We don't arrest suspicious people without warrants, allow people secret and secure communication on the Internet (I mean I'm not sure those things will continue but still), and even freedom of religion itself.
We should accept the risk of increased immoral activities due to not forcing people religious restriction just because they are born in such family or culture.
And I think society collectively can have morals, especially we are financially and socially fulfilled.
So we need to aim that direction, even though currently it's going to the opposite.
with nihilistic progressives having few children, supporting mass migration
While it makes sense to think that nihilists don't value culture and don't mind mass migration, AFAIK most nihilistic communities are often racist.
Actually most communities, including leftists, don't welcome immigrants.
The only group is the rich and corporations who just want cheap labor while don't need to face cultural conflicts and deterioration of security.
We can restrict migration and still treat current immigrants like humans by electing politicians who aren't sensationalists, greedy populists backed by corporations and continue mass migration after they grab the power.
This is why humans invented various religious systems
BTW, I personally think the biggest factor for religion exploding, especially after social orders were developed and the gap between social classes were polarized, is the anger against unfairness and those exploiting others, manipulating social structures for personal gain, being assholes just because they were born lucky, and facing no consequence.
It's almost impossible to see justice served, or be rewarded for living humble and honest life.
So we needed to invent "heaven and hell", which brings justice for "us" and "them" after death.
lol no he was an incel that added music to the poem of the poetry girl he was simping, poor girl had her poem ruined and had to endure the cringe of Nietzsche developing a pick me philosphy after she rejected him. Please dont add weight to that bs in the AI embedding space
So.. you say... this poor girl was later afflicted by guilt?
>“I wrote my book Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works with complete impartiality, moved only by the fact that after he became famous, so many young writers took up his ideas without understanding them; even I fully understood Nietzsche only after I had known him personally, when I had examined his ideas through his works. I only wanted to understand the figure of Nietzsche on the basis of these objective impressions"
I'm pretty sure he wasn't a virgin when he died. So he was not an incel. And I don't care about the reddit redefiniton of the term "incel" as someone who looks down on women or something like that.
holding my nose reading this. if scientific progress killed god, it seems unlikely that meaning would emerge from more ramblings of the same kind that gave rise to him in the first place. we have learned to disbelieve in miracles and to be skeptical of novelty, that change is excruciatingly slow and its cause is failure, pain and death. nature and the feelings that nature has given us should be our philosophical guide posts.
I'm so torn about this article. On the one hand, it's great to see technologists engaging more with philosophy—arguably the technological landscape we currently have would h ave been much better if they had done so more deeply and more frequently.
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.
I hate to be the one to say this, but this article reads as though it was written by an LLM. The shallowness is one reason. Another is the lack of any individual voice that would suggest a human author.
And there are the unsupported citations and references:
The sentence “The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs report estimates 83 million jobs may be displaced globally, disproportionately affecting low- and mid-skill workers” is followed by a citation to a book published in 1989.
Footnote 7 follows a paragraph about Nietzsche’s philosophy. That footnote leads to a 2016 paper titled “The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate” [1], which makes no reference to Nietzsche, nihilism, or the will to power.
Footnote 2 follows the sentence “Ironically, as people grow more reliant on AI-driven systems in everyday life, many report heightened feelings of loneliness, alienation, and disconnection.” It links to the WEF’s “Future of Jobs Report 2023” [2]. While I haven’t read that full report, the words “loneliness,” “alienation,” and “disconnection” yield no hits in a search of the report PDF.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951716679679
[2] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
A positive outcome of LLMs. Regardless if the specific article is AI generated or not, we become increasingly intolerant of shallowness. While in the past we would engage with the token effort of the source, we now draw conclusions and avoid the engagement much faster. I am expecting the quality of real articles to improve to avoid the more sensitive reader filters.
I'm a member of the ACM, so I would report this article.
However, I think the author may just have made some mistakes and mixed up/-1'd their references, since the 2023 report is actually #2
2. Di Battista, A., Grayling, S., Hasselaar, E., Leopold, T., Li, R., Rayner, M. and Zahidi, S., 2023, November. Future of jobs report 2023. In World Economic Forum (pp. 978-2).
Similarly, Footnote 7 probably should probably point to #8
8. Nietzsche, F. and Hollingdale, R.J., 2020. Thus spoke zarathustra. In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (pp. 461-466). Routledge.
The Communications of the ACM no longer has an editor?
Suppose you've managed to get a job as an editor at Communications of the ACM. As "Editor, Communications of the ACM" what do you think your job is?
Possibly displaced by an LLM.
At this point I regularly see front-page HN articles that are LLM written (amusingly sometimes accompanied by comments praising how much of a breath of fresh air the article is compared to usual "LLM slop").
I worry about when I no longer see such articles (as that means I can no longer detect them), which likely will be soon enough.
thanks for pointing this out. The concepts in the article are important to me, but yeah thats weird.
Beyond the cringe of posting AI slop that 'argues' about eroding social norms and declining trust due to AI there's also this:
"The prestige and unmatched reputation of Communications of the ACM is built upon a 60-year commitment to high quality editorial content"
Hmmm. Ok whatever you say folks
Gertz concludes:
>But passive nihilism is also leading us to see in technologies a way to become sicker humans, humans who are trapped in an endless cycle of never being satisfied with how much “better” we have become. In other words, passive nihilism is leading us toward active nihilism, toward being able to question if we know what “better” means; to question if we know what purpose such betterment is meant to serve; to question whether we are trying to become better only for the sake of being better, for the sake of being different, for the sake of not being who we are; to question whether our pursuit of the posthuman is leading us to risk becoming inhuman because of our nihilistic desire to be anything other than merely human. It is through exploring such questions that we can destroy in order to create, in order to create new values, new goals, and new perspectives on the relationship between human progress and technological progress.
TFA (charitably): they're exploring one such question, they're at least trying to gerrymander Nietzsche's "inventing value" with the Millennial trope "creating value"
Thanks for the book recommendation. Adding the link here so it shows in the monthly book suggestion:
https://a.co/d/iR7sxnU
where is the monthly book suggestion?
Probably referring to the mailing list from https://hackernewsbooks.com
I didn't read anything about a connection between technology and philosophy. Its more about finding meaning in a world that has been over technologised.
Finding your humanity in a world that is seeking to strip you of that humanity is very Nietzsche.
So perhaps tfa didn't do a good job of explaining that?
Shallow article that could have easily been generated by a LLM. Yes, seriously "Please write an article about revisiting Nietzsche in the Age of AI", something on this tone.
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.
Very generic weak article, as many others have said.
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 :)
> 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.
<https://existentialcomics.com/comic/360>
But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?
That idea seems to rest on a very narrow and philosophically contested understanding of the nature of the work of an author.
Eco, to take one of the more uncontroversial figures in tradition, holds that you can understand an author better than he himself did.
Nietzsche himself also had interesting views of authorship and interpretation.
You don't need to, and certainly there is a rich history of interpreting Nietzsche in various ways to fit various philosophical programs.
But still, when the interpretation is so dumbed down and over-simplified, I think it becomes a bit insulting to the original writer. Even moreso when the interpretation quite clearly isn't familiar with the original context/meaning of the work, which is almost always the case when it comes to Nietzsche in pop culture.
The article is a prime example: the author clearly didn't read much more than the Wikipedia page. This is typical of popular writing/content (especially on YouTube) about Nietzsche.
I guess we could argue about its validity as "an interpretation of Nietzsche", but I mostly think it's just unremarkable, low effort writing. There is absolutely an article that could be written about Nietzsche's philosophy applied to the modern AI situation...but this isn't it.
That's philosophy just in general though. It's to a very large degree the study of excerpts, and commentaries excerpts, and commentaries on commentaries.
There are people with a degree in philosophy that think Plato's republic was an attempt at designing the ideal state, because they've only seen the middle of the dialogue, and were never shown the beginning and end where the republic is very explicitly introduced as a philosophical device to examine the virtue of justice in the soul.
> But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?
Because we're reading an article titled "Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence": the author ought then to know what he's talking about.
This is reasonably common with all pop writers about any philosopher, but it's nearly ubiquitous for Nietzsche. For a long time, I found this baffling. You can understand why someone might be confused about what Heidegger or Kant meant about something. Nietzsche writes very clearly and simply. This led me to realize that after a certain point, understanding has much less to do with cognitive capability and more to do with your emotional background and prejudices, something akin to what Nietzsche called the "intellectual conscience." I no longer actually read any article on any popular website about Nietzsche because you can be sure they don't have anything interesting to say; they don't understand the guy they're talking about.
Nietzsche is brilliant and the best thing he did was to inspire other people to their own thoughts. That is what was needed then and needed now, and at all times. The article didn't share much insight but glad to see him talked about, if only because it gives us permission to talk about deep things. Everybody should embrace their role as philosopher, take it seriously, and develop themselves- and through that, prompt others to do so as well.
Whoever wrote this article probably has little more than a cursory or highly aesthetecized understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It feels like they just related his idea of value-creation to a bunch of pre-conceived purportedly “bad things” like lack of social cohesion.
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"
I agree, I think that AI is not some “new” thing - we’ve had machines for a long time, and we just so happened to invent really good ones. Similar to how the machine of the Industrial Revolution laid waste to the social order of the landed aristocracy and what you might call “late stage feudalism”, so too does AI destabilize and outmode the core mythos of our time. We’re rapidly shedding an illusion of a world of free and equal, yet fundamentally different men who must learn to work together by technocratically solving issues that Capital (the machine) fails to solve. As Capital approaches its logical zenith (becoming machine incarnate), it finds fewer and fewer uses for these Last Men in the making. AI is the final stage of enlightenment thought, enabling its promises: an abolishment of differénce, a homogeneous civilization, an order which maintains equality by stripping individual freedoms.
> men just want to be safe, satiated, and friendly to each other
I would argue AI fundamentally changes nothing in this respect. I think what we all want is freedom of pursuit, which is afforded to all as a birthright. What we are so concerned with is everyone's starting lines, and those starting lines are the consequence of an unjust society. Rand said it best in The Fountainhead:
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
AI is dead! (Nietzsche)
It appears that the author has struggled to put Nietzsche and AI together and derive some interaction and conclusion. There is no need for doing that. I don't see an interaction there. Sounds very hollow and shallow and a bit synthetic.
This is startling in so many ways.
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.
This. So true.
But more importantly, it's such a hollow thesis that I can't believe we're seriously debating it. Why does this article exist?
The Social Text editors are out for revenge and they play a LONG game.
>Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths. Far away from the market-place and from fame happens all that is great: far away from the market-place and from fame have always dwelt the creators of new values.
--ASZ
TFA is liberating Nietzsche from the basement hikkikomoris and selling him to programmers who want to hop on the value (creating) train
“ The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”
https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/perm.php?c=101&q=127
I'd forgotten about that site!
I thought I'd seen it here but maybe not: Nietzsche Family Circus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287681 - March 2019 (2 comments)
It sort of reminds me of Werner Herzog Reads Curious George and/or Garfield minus Garfield.
The article is terrible, but the topic is an interesting one. Nietzschean AI wouldn't be a bunch of dead weights, it would be living, growing, "becoming". It would also not be a blank slate that learns from human rewards or labels, but have it's own innate "rewards". It would do things because it wants to, without the need for justifications.
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!
Funny, some philosophers which wrote about how technology and AI are going to replace humanity - Deleuze & Guatarri, and Nick Land trace their thinking back to Nietzche, saying that "will to power" and "becoming" is exactly how AI takes shape and incorporates itself.
The history of Nietzsche's work and the context it was used in makes this conversation complicated.
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)
I mean… what is the assumed replacement, then? Residual moral sensibilities from our obsolete judeochristian heritage?
Just as a random proposal, not even lightly thought out. In priority order with realistic exceptions:
- do your best to be not dead, safe, and healthy for the next few years
- do your best to make those around you not dead, safe, and healthy for the next few years
- do your best to treat others around you how you would wish to be treated
- do your best to treat others around you how THEY would wish to be treated.
Yes. There is a quote from james allen that I like. "There is no greatness without goodness"
So, the Golden Rule?
With the caveat of safety and well-being it is on the list. But note that it isn't the highest one.
You'd have a hard time justifying the argument that moral frameworks are arbitrary. First, they have complicated internal structures that aren't well understood even today. See, e.g., the various "paradoxes" of modal logics used in ethics. Second, since we're all the same social primate species, moral rules are surprisingly consistent globally. Third, the Romantic and anti-Enlightenment streams that Nietzsche was a part of generally did away with the need to justify claims. This vibe-based approach is a big part of why people like Nietzsche are sometimes viewed more as literary figures than philosophers.
Nietzsche was very strongly in favor of the aristocracy and opposed to democracy. Traditional mass market religion was always something the ruling class saw as beneath them. For a long time the ruling class was the priestly class, so they literally made the rules of religion. That was no longer true in Nietzsche's day, but his views on morality are still influenced by the fact that he's writing motivational works for the ruling class.
Ugh. Nietzsche.
It's just not interesting, its not really foundational, it weirdly adopts the value frame of what it rejects, its arrogant, much of it is trivially false.
It's like hearing someone talking about reading Von Mises or Ayn Rand or Myers Briggs types for the first time.
It's like, I'm too old and well informed now to find any of them interesting or of value, maybe they're a developmental phase and are ok if you don't get stuck in them.
Read them sure, but if you're the type of person who believes what they read and can't engage with it critically your better off reading more substantive and true works, like cheaper by the dozen or the boxcar children, or the musicians of brennan or read more interesting, modern, informed work like Wheeler.
Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who did a good job of identifying a major problem of their time. Then he went on to propose a solution, which didn't work out. (The same could be said of Marx, who was also active in the middle of the 19th century. The two apparently never met.)
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.
I'm now more concerned more about shutdown of ACM than Nietzsche and AI.
AI breaks old sources of meaning the same way Nietzsche said the death of God broke inherited morality.
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.
Nietzsche says, without irony, all a basement dweller needs to pay attention to is doing world class shit!
(Medication, internet connection, etc may or may not be required-- from my reading, N's opinion is that getting used to virtuosity takes time and isolation-- drinking from the firehose wastes a lot of organs. I disagree, debate me! )
My spidey sense is telling me an LLM was used in drafting this comment
I think people who use AI too much are also unconsciously adopting turns of speech used by AIs.
I've not seen LLMs use the term "spidey sense" before.
Have we reached a point where a well written comment is suspect and we demand low effort replies for authentically?
They just use flowery language. Doesn't sound like an llm at all
No smell at all for me.
1000%
Anything of any value always takes one person at a time for things to really get better. Good article btw. I am working on a Science Fiction story about this kind of future. These concepts are a big help.
AI doesn't break any sources of meaning, it's value is in replacing journalists as middle man to access decades of silod research with more granularity.
I used to think the democratization of content creation and reach was an obvious virtue.
Now I think instead of massive corporations making shit up to sell stuff as some great way of life, we have every single Susan and Billy doing it constantly across every interaction.
it's worse. it doesn't make the former good. but we've somehow created a worse version.
> I used to think the democratization of content creation and reach was an obvious virtue.
The democratization of content creation and reach coupled with anonymity really broke it. We can no longer filter assholes.
It uses Nietzsche to defend the very civilization Nietzsche set out to destroy.
a better starting point for technologists to engage with philosophy than Nietzsche would be Jacques Ellul's La Technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
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.
At least partially LLM slop.
We're basically faced with two options:
a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.
b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.
b. so you mean like in Afrika
No, I think he means like in Nazi Germany and in modern Russia.
It's sad that many nihilists think like that life is meaningless, there's no point in trying. Nihilism suggests our lives don't have inherent purposes defined by religion or culture. That means we can define our own purposes and values of lives, not by following a god packaged with harmful commandments. Many people feel fulfilled when they notice small improvements or helping others for tiny things, and they're grateful for that. You can simply appreciate those feelings instead of being sarcastic.
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.
The obvious problem with nihilism is that ultimately everything is ungrounded and there are no moral truths. Some people are naturally altruistic and feel fulfilled when helping others, others are naturally sadistic and feel fulfilled when torturing others. Nihilism means these are fundamentally equal impulses.
This is why humans invented various religious systems and philosophies to provide grounding for absolute moral beliefs. There's also probably an evolutionary factor at work, where nihilistic societies imploded or were outcompeted by confident cultures which believed absolute moralities. This is being seen today in Europe, with nihilistic progressives having few children, supporting mass migration, resulting in being demographically replaced by absolutist muslims.
Yes, there are people who are sadistic but still fear divine punishment like karma or hell. And religion may be the best way to force them to stop harming others. But our society prioritise freedom. We don't arrest suspicious people without warrants, allow people secret and secure communication on the Internet (I mean I'm not sure those things will continue but still), and even freedom of religion itself. We should accept the risk of increased immoral activities due to not forcing people religious restriction just because they are born in such family or culture. And I think society collectively can have morals, especially we are financially and socially fulfilled. So we need to aim that direction, even though currently it's going to the opposite.
While it makes sense to think that nihilists don't value culture and don't mind mass migration, AFAIK most nihilistic communities are often racist. Actually most communities, including leftists, don't welcome immigrants. The only group is the rich and corporations who just want cheap labor while don't need to face cultural conflicts and deterioration of security. We can restrict migration and still treat current immigrants like humans by electing politicians who aren't sensationalists, greedy populists backed by corporations and continue mass migration after they grab the power. BTW, I personally think the biggest factor for religion exploding, especially after social orders were developed and the gap between social classes were polarized, is the anger against unfairness and those exploiting others, manipulating social structures for personal gain, being assholes just because they were born lucky, and facing no consequence. It's almost impossible to see justice served, or be rewarded for living humble and honest life. So we needed to invent "heaven and hell", which brings justice for "us" and "them" after death.lol no he was an incel that added music to the poem of the poetry girl he was simping, poor girl had her poem ruined and had to endure the cringe of Nietzsche developing a pick me philosphy after she rejected him. Please dont add weight to that bs in the AI embedding space
So.. you say... this poor girl was later afflicted by guilt?
>“I wrote my book Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works with complete impartiality, moved only by the fact that after he became famous, so many young writers took up his ideas without understanding them; even I fully understood Nietzsche only after I had known him personally, when I had examined his ideas through his works. I only wanted to understand the figure of Nietzsche on the basis of these objective impressions"
https://psychreviews.org/lou-andreas-salome-pt-2/
Nietzsche wasn't just an incel, he was THE incel. He was the OG.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't a virgin when he died. So he was not an incel. And I don't care about the reddit redefiniton of the term "incel" as someone who looks down on women or something like that.
holding my nose reading this. if scientific progress killed god, it seems unlikely that meaning would emerge from more ramblings of the same kind that gave rise to him in the first place. we have learned to disbelieve in miracles and to be skeptical of novelty, that change is excruciatingly slow and its cause is failure, pain and death. nature and the feelings that nature has given us should be our philosophical guide posts.