Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence

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.

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.

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 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 :)