Was Nietzsche A TechnoOptimist?
If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today, he would undoubtedly have millions of followers on social media. A master of aphorisms, this nineteenth-century German philosopher's greatest work contains common phrases like "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger"; "Look into the abyss and the abyss looks at you"; and the classic phrase: “God is dead. God is still dead. And we killed him."
From Andrew Tate to Bronze Age Perverts, Nietzschean thought has also experienced a bit of a renaissance online thanks to the extremes of the progressive left. As the "Red Pill God" of his time, Nietzsche waged a polemical war against Christianity and its Christian-inspired philosophy of asceticism and egalitarianism. Oianism, as modern Nietzscheans call it, has its origins in Christian "slave morality": an inversion of classical aristocratic morality that assumes the virtue of sacrifice, neutralizes human superiority, and seeks above all to protect the innocent.
Between the attacks on gifted programs and the growing tolerance for social unrest in American cities, our modern Nietzscheans are definitely right. But according to its new leader, venture capitalist and early Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Nietzsche can also help us understand the ongoing backlash against new technologies.
As Andreessen explained in his recent Techno-Optimist Manifesto, "we're being lied to" about technology. We are told it destroys jobs, damages the environment and creates inequality. Instead, he wrote, "our civilization is built on technology" because technology is "the glory of human ambition and achievement, the vanguard of progress and the realization of our potential."
Andreessen's penchant for aphorisms is well known. In 2011, he said, "Software is eating the world." During this pandemic, his call "It's time to build" became a rallying cry for builders and technologists across the country. It is no different from his last manifesto. Written in a series of short phrases and jokes, Andreessen's teachings were not intended to convince technical skeptics, but rather to create a Nietzschean aesthetic. On one side are the technological "superhumans" who take risks in search of a richer, freer, and richer future. On the other hand, there are smaller enemies standing in the way of progress: advocates of slow growth, AI skeptics, government bureaucrats and ESG consultants.
As a fan of Virginia Postrel's 1998 classic , The Future and Its Enemies, I'm familiar with many of these points, and most of them ring true. However, aphorisms risk creating the illusion of depth and are no substitute for reasoned reasoning. Unfortunately, this analytical weakness ultimately ties Andriessen's Manifesto into knots of internal contradictions.
Consider Andreessen's quotation of the anti-humanist philosopher Nick Land. "The combination of technology and markets results in what Nick Land calls the technological machine of capital, a machine of continuous creation, growth and material abundance," Andreessen writes. "We believe," he continues, "that the techno-capitalist machine is not anti-human—in fact, it may be the most pro-human machine ever seen. It's good for us . The techno-capitalist machine works for us . All machines work for us ." "
However, whether he realizes it or not (and I think he does), he has completely turned Land's philosophy on its head. Indeed, the term "techno-capital machine" is intended to emphasize the helplessness and subjugation of humanity to the constant forces of high-tech capitalism. According to Andreessen, our only goal is to ensure that "the upward spiral of techno-capital continues forever," not for us humans, for the sake of Land, but for the sake of the machines themselves. We'll just hang out; A simple downloader that will surely replace us for digital postmen.
Land is the mastermind behind Efficient Acceleration, oe/acc, an internet subculture that seeks to accelerate the emergence of super-intelligent artificial intelligence. The title is a play on effective altruism, an influential moral utilitarian movement whose proponents see the creation of an independent super-intelligence as an existential threat.
Earth does not fully agree with their predictions. Being a philosophical pessimist and misanthrope, he simply views the end of human civilization with a kind of sociopathic indifference. At one point, Land even suggested looking at the Black Death, a plague that killed 25 million people, from the perspective of a rat. When asked if the human experience was important, Land replied, "I don't see why it should be emphasized."
Andreessen disagrees with the skepticism of moralists. "Intelligence makes everything better", he wrote. For example, “human rights; we must develop it as fully and widely as possible. . . . "Artificial intelligence is our alchemist, our philosopher's stone: we literally make sand think." This is true to some extent, but it does little to alleviate concerns about the specific dangers of AI actually surpassing human capabilities, a development that most AI researchers now see as inevitable. Even references to AI's death cult's intellectual debt to its godfather offer no consolation.
Andreessen's confusion culminates in the question of whether technological optimists are utopians. While Andreessen sees technology as a "universal problem solver" that will enable us to colonize the stars, he firmly rejects utopian thinking. Instead, he wrote: "We espouse what Thomas Sowell calls a 'restrictive view' that sees compromise everywhere and sees progress as something that 'occurs only at the edges.'
This is my opinion. It also directly contradicts Andreessen's unstoppable idea that technology is a "liberating" force and that "the upward trajectory goes on forever." In contrast, Sowell's "restricted view" takes a deeply conservative view of human imperfection and, therefore, of the dualistic nature of technology.
Take, for example, the problem of population growth. Andreessen writes that technological optimists believe that "our planet is very sparsely populated" and that "the world's population could easily grow to 50 billion or more people." Agreed. However, birth rates in developed countries are falling not because of Malthusian birth control, but because of the inherent forces of modernity. For example, the advent of oral contraceptives in the 20th century was undoubtedly "liberating" for women who gained new autonomy over their biology. At the same time, despite being perhaps the first "transhumanist" technology, this separation of the sexes during pregnancy had profound cultural and demographic consequences that modern societies are still grappling with.
The implication of this observation is that we must, or even can, disrupt modernity simply by noting that bells cannot be turned off. Therefore, a conservative orientation to technology should be neither optimism nor pessimism, but stark realism, especially when the technology in question, such as artificial intelligence or biotechnology, directly affects what it means to be human.
Although many innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, the exact path of development and diffusion of new technologies remains uncertain. We can use public policy and personal initiative to shape technology in ways that empower our humanity and allow us to thrive rather than follow humanity into destruction and oblivion.
Nietzsche, for his part, would almost certainly reject Andriessen's techno-optimism, dismissing it as another form of secular Christianity, as if technologists were creating a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. It is true that the conformist and decadent "Last Man," whom Nietzsche described as passive mediocrity and whom Andriessen declared his chief enemy, is a byproduct of technological excitement.
As Nietzsche said in The Will to Power : “Thinking that one chooses a drug, one in fact chooses a drug that hastens exhaustion; Christianity is an example. . . "Progress" is something else.
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