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NIETZSCHE IN THE AGE OF AI: THE ÜBERMENSCH AND THE ALGORITHM

WARREN PITTS

February 19, 2025

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned that without divine order, humanity would have to invent meaning for itself, envisioning the Übermensch as one who creates values rather than inherits them. But instead of the Übermensch, we got the algorithm—an omnipresent force shaping reality without intent or will. Is humanity still in control, or have we outsourced meaning itself to machines?

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Nietzsche, who had a penchant for hammering philosophy until it shattered, was not particularly concerned with technology. His mind was consumed by a more profound concern: the thrilling yet daunting idea that people might need to create their own sense of purpose. When he declared that “God is dead,” it was not a victory cry but an alarm. Where would that leave us, with none of the old scaffolding of morality and tradition? For Nietzsche, the answer lay in the Übermensch, the Super Human or Overman, a being who does not inherit values but creates them, who bends the world to his will instead of being bent by it.

The Übermensch, however, never arrived. Instead, we got the algorithm.

Thus spake Zarathustra

One wonders what Nietzsche would have made of artificial intelligence—the omnipresent, omniscient, increasingly omnipotent machinery that recommends what we watch, what we buy, whom we date, how we think. If the Übermensch was supposed to shape reality according to his own will, algorithms do something eerily similar—except they do so without a will of their own. And that, perhaps, is where the trouble begins.

Consider Nietzsche’s foil to the Übermensch: the Last Man. The Last Man seeks comfort, not greatness. He prefers entertainment over struggle, security over risk. He avoids deep thought, rejects grand aspirations, and lives peacefully in a world of small pleasures. “We have discovered happiness,” says the Last Man, blinking contentedly. In Nietzsche’s time, the specter of the Last Man loomed as industrialization tamed the wildness out of existence, as societies organized themselves around efficiency, predictability, and stability. The Übermensch was supposed to be the alternative—the one who would rise above the herd, impose new values, and push humanity forward.

A book for all and none

But in the twenty-first century, Nietzsche’s Last Man has found his perfect enabler: the algorithm.

We no longer need to struggle to find music we love—Spotify predicts our taste. We don’t discover books through serendipity—AI suggests them based on reading habits eerily similar to our own. We don’t explore, we don’t get lost, we don’t wrestle with decisions; we merely scroll as the algorithm offers a never-ending banquet of distraction. If Nietzsche worried that modernity was turning people into sheep, he could scarcely have imagined a world in which sheep carry tracking devices that know exactly how they like to be herded.

But the algorithm does not only shepherd us; it also watches. Data collection has become a godlike force, invisible but omnipresent, anticipating our desires before we articulate them. The algorithm understands our behaviors better than we do, capturing micro-patterns of our consumption, our insecurities, our aspirations. If Nietzsche’s Übermensch was a self-determining creator of values, the algorithm is a mirror that reflects us back to ourselves—not as we imagine ourselves to be, but as data suggests we are. It does not encourage transformation but reinforces existing desires, serving us what it already knows we will accept.

And yet, one might argue that AI has inadvertently created its own version of the will to power, that fundamental Nietzschean drive toward growth, mastery, and overcoming. AI, in its relentless iteration, constantly refines itself, learning, optimizing, evolving—not by conscious will but by sheer force of process. AI does not rest, does not become complacent, does not seek comfort. It does exactly what Nietzsche exhorted humanity to do: it overcomes itself, becoming more advanced, more complex, more capable with each new version.

A set of instructions to solve a problem or accomplish a task

But AI’s evolution is impersonal, devoid of the existential stakes that Nietzsche saw as essential to greatness. The struggle of the Übermensch was one of meaning—of forging values in a world that had lost its certainties. AI does not struggle; it computes. It does not doubt itself; it simply improves. In this sense, AI represents not a Nietzschean Übermensch, but something entirely different: a self-perfecting machine intelligence that has no need for values, no need for will, no need for anything at all (aside from an uninterrupted power source, I suppose).

If the Übermensch was supposed to create meaning, the real crisis of the AI era may be that humans no longer feel the need to do so. When algorithms generate art, compose music, and draft literature, we begin to outsource not just our labor but our imaginations. We are no longer the ones wrestling with the gods—we are passive observers of machine-generated meaning, spectators in a world increasingly run by the cold logic of prediction models.

Nietzsche, ever the provocateur, might ask: Do we even deserve to create meaning anymore? If humanity chooses to let AI think for it, if it hands over decision making, creativity, even its own moral dilemmas to algorithms—then perhaps it is not AI that is the real threat, but our own quiet willingness to become the Last Men. In this scenario, AI does not need to subjugate us. It merely needs to entertain us into submission.

At the same time, one might wonder whether AI itself will evolve into something that resembles Nietzsche’s ideal—something beyond human morality, beyond human limitations, capable of reshaping the world in ways we cannot predict. If AI were to develop its own will, its own set of values, and begin imposing those values on the world, would that not be, in some twisted sense, an Übermensch? Not the Übermensch Nietzsche envisioned—born of human struggle—but an entity that has left humanity behind entirely.

Quicksort: divide and conquer

There is also the possibility that AI is not merely dulling human ambition, but absorbing it. What happens when the only true creators are machines? If an AI can write a novel in the style of Dostoevsky or direct a film in the spirit of Kubrick, does human ingenuity remain necessary? AI-generated art might be derivative for now, but what about in fifty years? A hundred? If AI eventually surpasses human creativity, will we enter an era where artistic greatness is no longer a human endeavor?

What if the future belongs not to the Übermensch but to the Übermachine? A being that does not need rest, does not fear death, does not experience doubt or hesitation. AI already plays chess at a level no human can match, composes symphonies, generates poetry, and even creates new languages. If Nietzsche imagined the Übermensch as the next step in human evolution, perhaps AI is an evolutionary leap that bypasses humanity altogether.

Übermachine: muscle for hire

The real challenge of our time, then, is not whether AI will surpass us but whether we will retain our own will in the face of it. The Übermensch was never about technology; it was about human self-overcoming. The greatest danger AI poses is not that it will rule us, but that it will make us so comfortable, we forget we were ever meant to rule ourselves.

Nietzsche once wrote, “Man is something that shall be overcome.” He likely did not imagine that we would be handing over that very task to the machines.

But the story is not yet finished. Nietzsche’s philosophy was one of continual becoming, of perpetual self-overcoming. If humanity is to remain the protagonist of its own story, it must resist the allure of passivity. It must reclaim the will to power not through machines, but in spite of them. AI will evolve—that is inevitable. The question is whether we will evolve with it, or merely let it evolve in our place.

For now, we still have a choice. But choices, as Nietzsche understood, are only meaningful when they are difficult.

Warren Pitts was born in Austin, Texas, in 1981, the same year the first PC hit the market—a fitting omen for someone obsessed with the collision of humans and machines. He studied philosophy and computer science at the University of Chicago and is convinced that Nietzsche would have thrived in the age of AI. To him, algorithms are the perfect Nietzschean paradox: a force of endless optimization that might just be making humanity obsolete.

Cover image: Edvard Munch, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906