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Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence
- cess11 1y agoThis is a rather insulting ad for the authors business, which I'm assuming isn't going well since very little seems to have come out of it since 2016.
- voidhorse 1y agoI'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.
- pfd1986 1y agoThanks for the book recommendation. Adding the link here so it shows in the monthly book suggestion: https://a.co/d/iR7sxnU https://a.co/d/iR7sxnU
- clueless 1y agowhere is the monthly book suggestion?
- swaits 1y agoProbably referring to the mailing list from https://hackernewsbooks.com https://hackernewsbooks.com
- amelius 1y agoAnd here is a review: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/30/book-review-nihilism-and-technology-by-nolen-gertz https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/30/book-rev...
- tkgally 1y agoI 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 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951716679679 [2] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/ https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
- dwohnitmok 1y agoAt 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.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 1y agoLove the optimism couched as pessimism. LLM training data doesn't do that.
- edavison1 1y agoBeyond 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
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoGertz 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"
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah but we need to distinguish between different types of nihilism. Existential nihilism (which it is talking about) is different from moral nihilism, for example. Moral nihilism is in essence: nothing is inherently morally wrong or right, with which I used to agree.
- trinsic2 1y agoI 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 1y agoFinding 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 1y ago[dead]
- voidhorse 1y agoHow is "finding meaning in a world that has been over technologised." anything other than an intersection of philosophy and technology?
- trinsic2 1y agoIt sounds like one begets the other and it appears to me both are independent.
- Libidinalecon 1y agoIt 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.
- ogogmad 1y agoHeidegger has a reputation of explaining his opinions poorly. That would still be fine if I didn't also suspect that he was a pseudo-intellectual.
- blackadder 1y agoGertz speaks at tech conferences and that’s how I came across his work https://youtu.be/mcPFs5im2bs?si=DeEcWROAWBjR-RVu https://youtu.be/mcPFs5im2bs?si=DeEcWROAWBjR-RVu
- ogogmad 1y agoAny book about technology's effects on society written before 2022 needs a massive update since the LLM revolution. Sadly, Gertz's "Technology and nihilism" was published in 2018.
- biophysboy 1y agoHe has an updated 2024 edition Edit: a link for the interested.. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/nihilism-and-technology-9781538193280/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/nihilism-and-technology-978153...
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoIndeed. 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? Pretty vacuous.
- blamestross 1y agoThe 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)
- Robotbeat 1y agoI mean… what is the assumed replacement, then? Residual moral sensibilities from our obsolete judeochristian heritage?
- blamestross 1y agoJust 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.
- trinsic2 1y agoYes. There is a quote from james allen that I like. "There is no greatness without goodness"
- Robotbeat 1y agoSo, the Golden Rule?
- blamestross 1y agoWith the caveat of safety and well-being it is on the list. But note that it isn't the highest one.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DuperPower 1y agolol 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
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoSo.. 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/ https://psychreviews.org/lou-andreas-salome-pt-2/
- beeflet 1y agoNietzsche wasn't just an incel, he was THE incel. He was the OG.
- trallnag 1y agoI'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.
- TylerLives 1y agoThe 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!
- retrocog 1y agoAI 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.
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoNietzsche 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! )
- trinsic2 1y agoAnything 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.
- xeckr 1y agoMy spidey sense is telling me an LLM was used in drafting this comment
- conception 1y ago1000%
- tomrod 1y agoI've not seen LLMs use the term "spidey sense" before.
- binary132 1y ago
- gsf_emergency_4 1y ago>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
- stanfordkid 1y agoWhoever 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 1y agoI 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.
- stanfordkid 1y agoAgreed. I think for Nietzsche a man creating meaning to their own existence is the act of the artist — conquering one’s self. God and the afterlife provided some basic land and footing to do this… or at least posited the possible existence of some unknown and to be discovered universal morality or frame of reference. God was sort of like Ether in pre-relativistic physics. 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.
- 5cott0 1y ago“ 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 https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/perm.php?c=101&q=127
- dang 1y agoI'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 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.
- wwarner 1y agoholding 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.
- cairnechou 1y ago[dead]
- beedeebeedee 1y agoNietzsche 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.
- YinglingHeavy 1y agoThe Redditor demographic, and this one as well, is the epitome of "Last Man".
- abc123abc123 1y agoAmen! 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.
- andai 1y agoWe'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.
- hastamelo 1y agoFunny, 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.
- cyber_kinetist 1y agoDid 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.
- hastamelo 1y agoas usual with philosophers, you need to decrypt them first > 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-techne-and-the-posthuman-drift/ https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/deleuze-tec...
- julienmarie 1y agoIt uses Nietzsche to defend the very civilization Nietzsche set out to destroy.
- Animats 1y agoNietzsche 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.
- tome 1y ago> he went on to propose a solution, which didn't work out What was his proposed solution?
- tug2024 1y ago[dead]
- chemotaxis 1y agoThis 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 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.
- CamperBob2 1y agoBut 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.
- zkmon 1y agoThis. So true.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hamasho 1y agoIt'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.
- exoverito 1y agoThe 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.
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- keiferski 1y agoVery 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 :)
- kbrkbr 1y agoBut 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 1y agoYou 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.
- zkmon 1y agoIt 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.
- zkmon 1y agoI'm now more concerned more about shutdown of ACM than Nietzsche and AI.
- DyslexicAtheist 1y agoa 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 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.
- senderista 1y agoAt least partially LLM slop.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- silcoon 1y agoShallow 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.
- amai 1y agoAI is dead! (Nietzsche)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mox-1 1y agoTLDR 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.
- dartharva 1y agoA lot of words with no insight beyond "make your own purpose bro, because AI is coming to take your livelihood". An LLM could ironically have written a better article.
- rawgabbit 1y agoSorry. Nietzsche automatically brings up the memory that he was the Nazi's favorite philosopher. https://www.hitler-archive.com/photo.php?p=mlop7789 https://www.hitler-archive.com/photo.php?p=mlop7789
- red-iron-pine 1y agothis article sucks and completely misses nietzsche in a lot of ways. 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.”