Okay, so everyone is talking about AI taking our jobs. But I don’t think that’s what we’re truly
afraid of. We’re not afraid of poverty. We’re afraid of becoming unnecessary.
If a machine can think, create, and code better than you... what is the point of you?
"In 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published The Gay Science,
which features a famous scene called 'The Parable of the Madman.'
In the story, a man runs into a busy marketplace in broad daylight, holding
a lantern, shouting, “I seek God! I seek God!” People laugh at him. They tease him: “Did God get
lost? Is he hiding?” They treat it like a joke. But the madman stops, stares at them,
and finally says: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Nietzsche didn’t mean we literally killed a god. He meant that science
and reason replaced our need for God. We swapped mystery for facts,
the cathedral for the lab, and made the divine unnecessary.
Nietzsche was warning us. Removing God also removes the sense of security people relied on.
For thousands of years, religion told people who they were, why they suffered, and what their lives
meant. When that sun disappeared, Nietzsche predicted that the West would face a crisis of
meaning. We would lose our center of gravity. So what did we do? We replaced the old
structure with a new one. In the 20th century,
we built society around utility. We decided that meaning comes from being useful.
You’re a writer. A coder. A doctor. An analyst. Your identity is your competence.
Your value is your output. “I am useful, therefore I matter.”
And that brings us to today. Right now, that entire structure is collapsing.
We’ve created machines that can imitate the very abilities we’ve built our identities
on - logic, creativity, analysis, language. If you’re a writer and the machine writes faster…
If you’re a coder and the machine codes better… If you’re an analyst and the
machine sees what you can’t… The real fear isn’t, “Will I lose my job?”
It’s the same fear the madman felt: We’re facing the “Death of Human Utility.”
And just like in Nietzsche’s time, we’re not prepared for
the psychological weight that comes with it. In this video, I want to look at AI through
Nietzsche’s eyes. I want to explore the danger of becoming what he called “The Last Man”- a passive,
comfort-addicted observer. And I want to talk about the solution he offered. Because if
we’re losing our utility, we need something else to keep us from falling into the dark.
Act 1: The Idol of Utility In the old world, your value
was given to you. You were a child of God. You had a soul. You didn't have
to "earn" your right to exist - it was inherent. But as the world became secular, we looked to new
ways to measure human worth, and for the most part, we seem to have settled on Meritocracy.
We decided that the most valuable humans are the ones who can solve problems, process information,
and generate wealth. We moved from the cathedral to the office. We stopped confessing
our sins and started updating our résumés. Think about how we introduce ourselves. We don't
say who we are. We say what we do. "I'm a lawyer." "I'm a designer." "I'm a Content Creator."
I think we can safely say that - for the most part - we have completely merged our
identity with our utility. For a long time, this felt safe.
During the Industrial Revolution, machines came for our muscles. The steam engine and the tractor
made physical strength less valuable. But we didn't panic. We felt superior. We told ourselves:
"That’s fine. Let the machines do the heavy lifting. Humans are the
thinking animal. Our value is in our minds." We retreated into a "Cognitive Citadel."
We convinced ourselves that creativity, logic, and judgment were the sacred, untouchable
parts of the human experience. Things silicon could never touch, and CERTAINLY not emulate…
But AI has breached the citadel walls. When you read a poem that moves you,
only to find out it was generated… Or generated code that builds the app idea
in your head perfectly… Or an algorithm that diagnoses a disease better than a specialist…
It doesn’t just threaten your income. It proves that the very thing you thought was
special about you - your intelligence - is just a process. And it’s a process that can be automated
in more ways than you ever thought possible. We are currently facing the "Horse Moment."
In 1900, a horse was essential to the economy. It pulled carriages, plowed fields, and moved goods.
Fast forward twenty years and the combustion engine had all but removed horses from the economy
entirely. They could still exist for pleasure, and gambling, but it had zero economic utility.
We are now staring at the combustion engine of the mind. If everything you believe makes you
valuable - your intelligence, your cleverness, your creativity - is suddenly eclipsed by a tool…
then you are not just facing unemployment. You are facing a spiritual crisis.
Because if you’ve spent your whole life believing “I matter because I’m useful,”
and you wake up in a world where a machine, a technology, is more useful than you…
then you are, in Nietzsche’s sense, about to lose your religion.
So if we can no longer find meaning in work… If our utility can be replaced…then what’s left?
Act 2: The Abyss & The Last Man
When a value system collapses, we fall into what Nietzsche called nihilism. Nihilism isn’t
just sadness or pessimism. It’s the belief that nothing truly matters anymore - that the highest
values we once believed in have lost their power. Nietzsche warned that once we lost our guiding
“Why,” we wouldn’t immediately find a new one. Instead, we’d reach for comfort. We’d choose
the path of least resistance. And out of that choice, a new kind of human being would emerge.
He called this person Der Letzte Mensch - The Last Man.
The Last Man is the final product of a civilization that has made itself completely safe.
He is healthy. He is comfortable. He has entertainment. He has convenience.
He “knows everything” because his world is full of information.
But he has no fire inside him. He takes no risks.
He has no great purpose. He avoids suffering at all costs.
He never aims at anything that could break his heart.
Nietzsche says that when he asks, “What is love? What is creation? What is longing?”
he’s not genuinely curious - he’s showing that he no longer understands or cares about
these deeper human drives. To him, life is about staying warm, staying fed, and staying
comfortable. Nothing more. Nothing less. For over a century, the Last Man was
just a philosophical warning. But today, look around: Silicon Valley
is building the perfect habitat for him. The promise of AI is total frictionlessness.
A life without effort. A life where nothing is hard.
Why struggle to learn a language? The AI translates instantly.
Why struggle to write a difficult message? The AI drafts it for you.
Why struggle to create art? The AI generates it in seconds.
Why wrestle with ideas? Why practice a skill? Why learn anything slowly?
We’re optimizing the human experience so much that we risk optimizing the humanity out of it.
And here’s the trap: We think we want this.
We think we want comfort, convenience, and instant results.
But Nietzsche understood something tech companies don’t: Meaning comes from friction.
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, called it "Noodynamics."
He argued that mental health requires a certain amount of tension. We think
we want "homeostasis" - a tensionless state where we are perfectly relaxed. But Frankl said that is
dangerous. He wrote that what man actually needs is "the striving and struggling for a worthwhile
goal." When AI removes the struggle - when it answers the question before you’ve even asked
it - it deprives you of that healthy tension. It creates an "existential vacuum." And nature
abhors a vacuum. If you don't fill that space with purpose or struggle, despair will fill it for you.
So, back in about 2008 I did one of those charity Inca Trail treks with my wife over the course of
three days going from… Cusco all the way to Machu Picchu. And after three days of mountain trekking,
experiencing the Peruvian Cloud Forests and all these amazing things, we get there, first thing
in the morning, to see a pair of tourists who’d taken the train. And their description of sunrise
over Machu Picchu, one of the most glorious sights in all the world was… “That’s neat.”
Because the meaning wasn’t in the view. The meaning was in the climb - in the exhaustion,
the doubt, the cold, the struggle to get there. When AI removes the “climb” from everything -
from art from work
from learning from creation
…it leaves us with nothing but the “view.” And a view without a climb is just a screensaver.
This is the real danger of the AI age. Not that robots will revolt.
But that they will pamper us into oblivion - doing all the thinking, creating,
striving, and learning for us - while we slowly become the Last Man:
comfortable safe
unthreatened and completely empty.
So if the machine takes the struggle, what do we do?
How do we keep our humanity alive?
How do we avoid becoming the Last Man? Nietzsche had an answer for that, too.
But it requires accepting a hard truth about mediocrity.
Act 3: The Crisis of Mediocrity The reason we are so afraid of AI
is not just because it’s powerful. It’s because it exposes how much of
our daily lives are actually... pretty mediocre. Nietzsche was not a fan of "the herd." He believed
that most of culture was just people copying other people. He believed that true originality was
rare, and that most of us are just sleepwalking through life, repeating the same thoughts and
doing the same tasks over and over again. AI is the ultimate "Herd Machine." It is
trained on the average of all human knowledge. It is the statistical mean of everything we have
ever written or created. So, if your work is average... if you are just rearranging words,
or copying a coding style, or painting like everyone else... then maybe the machine should
replace you… or at least what you do. For the last twenty years, the internet
created a culture of "Content." Not art. Content. Clickbait articles. Generic emails. SEO-optimized
blog posts. Formulaic pop songs. We turned human creativity into a factory assembly line.
AI is simply the machine that runs that factory better than we do. It
is burning down the forest of mediocrity and selling it back to us for a profit.
If your job was as a “Data Processor”, where you take information from pile A and do some maths
with it and put it in pile B- that job is gone. The era of the "average knowledge worker" is over.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, predicts that the "marginal cost of intelligence" will trend toward
zero. Think about what that means. Throughout history, intelligence was expensive. It was rare.
It was high-status. But in the very near future, asking a computer to solve a complex problem will
cost as little as asking it to add 2+2. When intelligence becomes free, it stops being a
differentiator. It stops being an identity. So if your identity is built on "being smart," you might
well be about to experience an identity crash. This leaves you with two choices. You can be
angry. You can resent the machine. You can try to ban it or regulate it or
ignore it… Or, you can use a concept by Nietzsche called Amor Fati - Love of Fate.
It is the practice of accepting reality exactly as it is, without wishing it were different.
Right now, a lot of people are wasting their energy wishing AI didn't exist. They are angry.
They are resentful. They are bargaining with the future. But that is a waste of life. It failed
with Gutenberg’s Movable Type. It failed with the Luddites during the industrial revolution
and the French Saboteurs in the early 1900s. You cannot negotiate with a technological revolution.
So, instead of looking at AI as a disaster, I want you to look at it as a fire. In nature,
a forest fire is destructive, yes. But it is also necessary. It burns away the dead wood.
It clears out the brush that is blocking the sunlight. It creates the space for new growth.
Similarly AI is burning away the "Processor" mindset. For the last fifty years, we have been
training humans to act like computers. We taught people that "work" meant taking data from one
place, rearranging it, and moving it to another place. We rewarded people for being efficient,
repetitive, and error-free. We tried to become machines. And now that the actual machines
have arrived, that game is over. If your value comes from being a
"Processor" - from just moving information around - you are in trouble. A computer will always be
a better processor than you. But here is the flip side.
The machine is forcing us to stop being Processors and start being Creators.
Think about the standard of excellence. Before AI, just being "competent" was enough to make a
living. If you could write a grammatically correct article, or code a basic website,
or design a half-decent logo, you had some value. But now? Competence is free. "Good
enough" is automated. The baseline quality for everything has just shot through the roof.
This sounds scary, but it is actually a filter. It filters out the mediocre. It filters out the
people who were just going through the motions. When basic skills become easy for computers,
the thing that still matters is having ideas. We’re entering a world where knowing how to
do something is easy, but knowing why you’re doing it is what counts.
So the real question is: if being “useful” isn’t enough anymore,
how do we build a life that matters?
Nietzsche thought this would happen. He believed that when old sources of
comfort disappear, a new kind of person has to learn to create their own meaning.
He called this person the “Übermensch,” or the Overman.
Act 4: The Solution The term "Übermensch" is often misunderstood.
In Nietzsche’s philosophy, The Übermensch - or the Overman - is simply a person who has bridged the
gap. He is the one who stops looking outward for permission and starts looking inward for
purpose. He doesn't wait for the Market to tell him what is valuable. He creates his own value.
But how do you actually do that on a Tuesday morning when you have deadlines? Here is the
practical roadmap for becoming the Übermensch in the age of AI.
1. Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking - We need to fundamentally change how we view "effort."
Since at least the dawn of this millenium, we’ve been obsessed with "efficiency." We
want the result as fast as possible. But AI has devalued the result. If a machine can write the
essay, code the app, or design the slide deck in seconds... the final product always feels cheap.
So, where is the value? The value is in the struggle of creating it.
Think about lifting weights. If your only goal was to move a piece of metal from the floor to the
ceiling, you would use a forklift. It’s faster. It’s more efficient. But you don’t go to the gym
to move metal. You go to the gym to become the person who can move metal. The value isn't in the
bar moving; the value is in the resistance tearing your muscles and making you stronger. Neuroscience
actually backs this up. There is a mechanism in your brain called the "Effort-Driven Reward
Circuit", which connects the movement centers of your brain directly to the pleasure centers.
Evolution wired us this way: While we still get satisfaction from getting food we like so
we don’t die, we don’t get that same, deep sense of personal satisfaction we get from having found
or prepared it ourselves. Similarly, when you let ChatGPT write the essay, or let Midjourney
paint the picture, you are short-circuiting your own biology. You get the result, but
you don't get the neurochemical reward. You are effectively cheating your own brain out of joy.
So if you are a writer, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, do not let AI write your first
draft. Use it to edit, sure. Use it to brainstorm, absolutely… but do not let it do all your thinking
for you. If you skip the struggle of articulation, your brain starts to atrophy. If you are a coder,
do not just copy-paste the solution. Read it. Understand the logic, and maybe
even improve it! The Übermensch understands that the machines can do the heavy lifting,
but the human must do the heavy thinking. 2. Bet on the "Un-Scalable" The "Last Man"
wants everything to be scalable and automated. But in an AI world, "automated" equals "abundant." And
abundant things are worthless. Scarcity is found in the things that cannot be scaled.
Kai-Fu Lee, one of the world's leading AI experts, predicts a massive shift in the economy. He argues
that we are moving from an "Intelligence Economy" to an "Empathy Economy." He points
out that while AI is excellent at Optimization - finding the best route, the best diagnosis,
the best strategy - it is incapable of Compassion. A machine can offer a medical diagnosis, but it
cannot hold a patient's hand and offer hope. A machine can teach a lesson, but it cannot mentor
a student who is struggling with self-doubt. As Lee puts it: "AI will take the tasks that
are routine and optimizing. Humans must take the tasks that are creative and compassionate."
Look at your work. What parts of it require your actual physical presence or your unique history?
AI can write an email, but it cannot fly to a client's office and shake their hand.
AI can generate a generic pop song, but it cannot perform live in a dive
bar and know how to read a crowd. AI can aggregate news, but it cannot
understand sentiment or understand what is or is not misinformation.
So shift your career toward the "high-touch," "inefficient" things. Hand-write the thank you
note. Record the video with your face. Build the community that
requires real-time interaction. The machine dominates the realm of Data,
so YOU must dominate the realm of Experience. 3. Become the Architect, Not the Builder
AI is a People-Pleasing-Answerbot. It can be a miracle of retrieval - when it isn’t
hallucinating - but it’s always passive. It waits for a prompt. It cannot wake up in the
morning and decide to change the industry, to change the world. That is your burden. The
machine can try to answer any question, but it can never actually care about the result.
If you are a graphic designer, stop worrying about how fast you can use Photoshop.
The AI will win. Start worrying about Taste. Start worrying about Originality. AI can only
ever be the sum of its parts. You can be something greater. Don't be the guy laying
the bricks - the code, the words, the pixels. Be the Architect who designed the building.
As an example, take legendary music producer Rick Rubin. He doesn’t play instruments well.
He doesn’t know how to work the sounddesk. By technical standards, he is "unskilled." Yet, he
is responsible for some of the greatest albums in history. Seriously, look him up, he produced Limp
Bizkit, RHCP, Shakira, Aerosmith, Kanye West, Ed Sheeran and literally hundreds of other artists.
And somehow, when asked what he actually does, he said: "I have no technical ability. And I
know nothing about music... The only thing I have to offer is my taste." This is the future of the
Übermensch. When the machine has all the technical ability in the world, your value is your Taste.
Your value is your ability to say, "This is good, this is bad, and this is where we are going."
The Übermensch doesn't reject the tool. He wields it. He treats AI like a very fast,
very talented intern. The intern does the work, but the Übermensch provides the Vision.
So, don't try to out-compute the computer. You will lose. Instead,
be the one who sets the intention. Be the one who decides where we are going.
Act 5: The Bridge We have covered a
lot of ground. And if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed, that is a normal reaction. Losing
your economic safety net is terrifying. Losing your sense of being "needed" is even worse.
But I want to leave you with one final image from Nietzsche. It is perhaps his most famous metaphor.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes: "Man is a rope, tied
between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.” For a long time, we thought our job was just to
stand safely on the edge. To be comfortable. To be employed. To be "useful." But AI has removed
the ledge. The safety of the "average life" is gone. The ground has crumbled behind us.
So now, you are out on the tenuous, wobbly ropebridge of life. Below you
is the abyss of the Last Man - a life of passive consumption and total redundancy,
devoid of value. Ahead of you is the path of the Overman - a life of self-created meaning,
difficult challenges, and true vision. It is a dangerous crossing. But
standing still is no longer an option. So, do not lament the jobs that are disappearing.
Do not look back at the era of "utility" that is ending. And instead, look across.
The machine has taken the "chores" of intelligence
and now you are free to do the true work of humanity. Creation, Connection and Purpose.
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