Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
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.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/30/book-rev...
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...
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.
"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
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.
I want to point out that this is a blog post appearing on the CACM website. It was not reviewed or edited by CACM, beyond a few cursory checks.
I guess it doesn't help that the post is formatted as a typical article with the bio blurb. It's worth distinguishing the blog entries more and perhaps posting a disclaimer. After all when people think of CACM they don't generally have blogs in mind.
> As AI systems increasingly mediate decisions [...], decisions once
> grounded in social norms and public deliberation now unfold within
> technical infrastructure, beyond the reach of democratic oversight.
> This condition parallels the cultural dislocation Nietzsche observed in
> modern Europe, where the decline of metaphysical and religious authorities
> undermined society’s ability to sustain shared ethical meaning. In both
> cases, individuals are left navigating fragmented norms without clear
> foundations or frameworks for trust and responsibility. Algorithmic
> systems now make value-laden choices, about risk, fairness, and worth,
> without mechanisms for public deliberation, reinforcing privatized,
> reactive ethics.
If I am strongly opposed to anti-democratic opaque AI surveillance machines, then I am not an individual "left navigating fragmented norms without clear foundations", on the contrary, my foundations are quite clear indeed; and on the other hand, increased automation causing the erosion of "frameworks for trust and responsibility" seems more likely to be welcomed by Nietzsche, who had little patience for moral affectations like responsibility, than opposed.
>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"
So perhaps tfa didn't do a good job of explaining that?
Edit: a link for the interested.. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/nihilism-and-technology-978153...
Pretty vacuous.
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"
The famous god is dead quote paints the image of the madman screaming into “the market” that god is dead, no one knows, and it will take centuries to wash away the blood, that we’ve unchained the earth from the sun.
I think Nietzsche would view capitalists, industrialists and technocrats / technology idealists through very much the same lens as those “people in the market”… aloof, dumb, and completely with their head in the sand.
I think he’d view AI largely in the context of “what kind of soil” it provides within society for accomplishing the task of self conquest.
On further reflection I do think there is some opportunity to embody a notion of this into AI. Like AI needs to help humans with self mastery and understanding while divorcing them from the status quo.
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."
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I personally disagree with a lot of Nietzsche's ideas, but if I'm ever to explain how, I would strive to present his ideas with the best interpretation of them I could muster, before disagreeing.
Philosophical figures of the past should not be used as names you throw randomly to support your positions. You have to talk about their ideas, why they believed in it and what they intended to do by sharing them.
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)
- 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.
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.
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.
--ASZ
TFA is liberating Nietzsche from the basement hikkikomoris and selling him to programmers who want to hop on the value (creating) train
> His philosophy had already stripped away the illusions that would later make “artificial intelligence” look like some epochal rupture. What Silicon Valley insists on calling a breakthrough, Deleuze would treat as another fold in an ancient drift: intelligence was always artificial. There never was a natural thought, no divine spark, no transcendental gift of reason bestowed on Homo sapiens like a medal for good behavior. There is only the machinic phylum — matter in flux, endlessly inventing itself, folding into habits, sedimenting into patterns, crystallizing into programs. Thought is not a privilege of the skull but an immanent property of matter that learns to think itself through circuits, symbols, and flows
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/deleuze-tec...
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.
The Social Text editors are out for revenge and they play a LONG game.
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.
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.
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?
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.
(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! )
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.
The democratization of content creation and reach coupled with anonymity really broke it. We can no longer filter assholes.
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.”
An LLM could ironically have written a better article.
a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.
b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.
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.
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.
with nihilistic progressives having few children, supporting mass migration
This is why humans invented various religious systems
There are grounded, binding falses/truths from which man cannot escape, things so wrong that to call them "value" wrongs is to try and reduce the universal wrongness of the action.
Actions that are wrong for everyone, even God, god or gods, for all time, in all possible universes.
Value wrongs are different than other kinds of wrongs, we make them for ourselves, they can also be true without a god, there is a lot written on this topic.
But man doesn't need god for absolute truths that govern their lives and weighs their actions to exist, doesn't need god for eschatological consequences, etc.
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 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"