Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence
88 comments
·November 11, 2025voidhorse
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.
Libidinalecon
It is almost like there is a book by Heidegger called "The Question Concerning Technology" that basically talks about all the things mentioned in the article.
tkgally
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...
cgio
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.
andai
I now notice myself cringe internally whenever I say anything that has become a ChatGPT-ism, even if it's something I always used to say.
xarope
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.
tgv
The Communications of the ACM no longer has an editor?
dwohnitmok
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.
IAmGraydon
It was written by an LLM because it’s another hype piece for AI.
trinsic2
thanks for pointing this out. The concepts in the article are important to me, but yeah thats weird.
edavison1
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
gsf_emergency_4
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"
null
pfd1986
Thanks for the book recommendation. Adding the link here so it shows in the monthly book suggestion:
amelius
And here is a review:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/30/book-rev...
clueless
where is the monthly book suggestion?
swaits
Probably referring to the mailing list from https://hackernewsbooks.com
trinsic2
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.
4ndrewl
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?
the-ads-did
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keiferski
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 :)
teddyh
> 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.
kbrkbr
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.
keiferski
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.
marginalia_nu
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.
Amezarak
> 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.
silcoon
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.
beedeebeedee
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.
stanfordkid
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"
hyperadvanced
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.
hresvelgr
> 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."
zkmon
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.
chemotaxis
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.
zkmon
This. So true.
CamperBob2
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.
gsf_emergency_4
>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
5cott0
“ The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”
dang
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.
amai
AI is dead! (Nietzsche)
TylerLives
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!
TLDR of this article would be something like: "Nietzche's ideas were relevant at the time of the industrial revolution - AI poses similar risks to people's feelings of displacement and redundancy, so they are relevant here too". Would have loved to have heard a take on HOW they are relevant.