6 ms·
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
by voidhorse 11mo ago
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.
- pfd1986 11mo 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 11mo agowhere is the monthly book suggestion?
- swaits 11mo agoProbably referring to the mailing list from https://hackernewsbooks.com https://hackernewsbooks.com
- amelius 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoLove the optimism couched as pessimism. LLM training data doesn't do that.
- edavison1 11mo 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
- trinsic2 11mo agothanks for pointing this out. The concepts in the article are important to me, but yeah thats weird.
- xarope 11mo agoI'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 11mo agoThe Communications of the ACM no longer has an editor?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- gsf_emergency_4 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago[dead]
- voidhorse 11mo agoHow is "finding meaning in a world that has been over technologised." anything other than an intersection of philosophy and technology?
- trinsic2 11mo agoIt sounds like one begets the other and it appears to me both are independent.
- Libidinalecon 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.