Thanks for the book recommendation. Adding the link here so it shows in the monthly book suggestion:

https://a.co/d/iR7sxnU

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...

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"

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.

I mean… what is the assumed replacement, then? Residual moral sensibilities from our obsolete judeochristian heritage?

You'd have a hard time justifying the argument that moral frameworks are arbitrary. First, they have complicated internal structures that aren't well understood even today. See, e.g., the various "paradoxes" of modal logics used in ethics. Second, since we're all the same social primate species, moral rules are surprisingly consistent globally. Third, the Romantic and anti-Enlightenment streams that Nietzsche was a part of generally did away with the need to justify claims. This vibe-based approach is a big part of why people like Nietzsche are sometimes viewed more as literary figures than philosophers.

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.

So.. 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/

Nietzsche 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! )

Anything 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.