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.
Indeed. The attempt to weave Nietzsche into the article seems forced, almost as if the author just read a commentary on Nietzsche or didn't actually have anything of substance to say to begin with. We have some observations about the effects people expect AI to have on things like work and some bullet points that looked like they've been cribbed from an LLM summary of Nietzsche's works. And then, at best, what? Hand-wavy imperatives that suggest we overcome or adapt the shift AI will cause in Nietzschean fashion?
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)
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
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!
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.
>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
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"
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.
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.
Amen! Philosophy is a personal and life long process of improvement. Everyone, knowingly or not, is a philosopher. Just the act of living is philosophy. If possible, live consciously and do not go through the motions. It will deepen and enrich your life, and hopefully, bring meaning into it.
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.
Did Deleuze & Guatarri explicitly comment on the topic of capitalism / technology / AI? I know that their concept of deterritorialization / desiring-production has certainly influenced Nick Land's accelerationist writings, but haven't heard anything about it from D&G themselves.
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.
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.
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.
One of the strangest phenomena (to me) is the phenomenon of young people stealing cars, then driving them around in circles, in the middle of some city no less, until they burn out and catch fire. Apparently it's fun for some. They're called "street takeovers".
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 :)
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 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.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] threadOn 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.
Pretty vacuous.
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)
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!
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.
--ASZ
TFA is liberating Nietzsche from the basement hikkikomoris and selling him to programmers who want to hop on the value (creating) train
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.
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.
What was his proposed solution?
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.
One of the strangest phenomena (to me) is the phenomenon of young people stealing cars, then driving them around in circles, in the middle of some city no less, until they burn out and catch fire. Apparently it's fun for some. They're called "street takeovers".
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 :)
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.