A recent Communications of the ACM article asks why Nietzsche might matter in the age of artificial intelligence.
The connection initially sounds like the kind of thing that happens when we run out of contemporary metaphors and start recruiting dead philosophers. Nietzsche didn't know anything about language models, and I doubt much is gained by pretending he somehow anticipated them.
There is, however, a question he took seriously that feels newly useful.
What happens when something that once helped organize meaning stops carrying the weight we placed on it?
Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" wasn't simply an announcement that some people had stopped believing in God. He was concerned with what followed from the weakening of a framework through which European culture had organized morality and meaning. Removing an answer doesn't remove the questions the answer had been carrying.
AI obviously isn't the death of God.
It is putting pressure on some much smaller arrangements that we've nevertheless allowed to carry a surprising amount of identity.
For a long time, asking someone what they did for a living told us quite a bit about how to begin understanding them.
She's a journalist.
He's a programmer.
She's an illustrator.
He's a teacher.
Those descriptions never contained the whole person, but they compressed a great deal. They suggested training, competence, daily activity, social role and sometimes status. People spent years acquiring the abilities that made those descriptions credible.
Then a machine produces competent prose, writes functioning code, generates an illustration or explains calculus.
That doesn't make the machine a journalist, programmer, illustrator or teacher. Neither does it make the human role meaningless.
It does make the relationship between the role and the capability less obvious.
If producing code was part of the evidence that someone was a programmer, what happens when millions of people can produce useful code with assistance from a machine?
Perhaps nothing important.
Calculators didn't eliminate mathematicians. Cameras didn't eliminate painters. Search engines didn't eliminate people who know things. Technologies routinely change which parts of a skill are scarce without eliminating the larger practices surrounding them.
AI may do the same.
Still, I think it's worth noticing the pressure because many of us have allowed competence to answer questions it was never quite capable of answering.
I can write this, therefore I'm a writer.
I can build this, therefore I'm a programmer.
I know more about this subject than most people around me, therefore this knowledge tells me something important about who I am.
Those aren't absurd conclusions. What we repeatedly do becomes part of our lives, and other people understandably come to recognize us through it.
The trouble appears when the capability and the identity become indistinguishable.
AI separates them experimentally.
A person who has never programmed can now produce some working software. Someone who doesn't draw can generate an image. Someone who hasn't spent years learning prose can produce an acceptable business letter in seconds.
The artifact no longer tells us as much about the person who produced it.
That creates a practical problem in education, employment and authorship, but it creates a more interesting personal question too.
If the artifact becomes weaker evidence of identity, what evidence remains?
My first instinct is to answer with persistence.
What do you return to?
What do you continue doing when the novelty disappears, when nobody is impressed, when the work becomes tedious or when the first version fails?
There is something useful in that question, although I wouldn't turn it into another definition of identity.
People return to harmful things too. Habits persist. Fear persists. Obligations persist. Someone can spend thirty years doing work they dislike because it feeds their family. Another perso