CONCEPT
Self-Automation
The surpassing of one’s tasks by delegating them to a machine, arriving at the result without the struggle that would have transformed the one who struggled—Nietzsche’s self-overcoming inverted, and the deepest danger the AI age poses not to employment but to the formation of the self.
The deepest danger of artificial intelligence, on
Nietzsche’s analysis, is not that it will overwhelm us in some external contest but that it will offer a counterfeit of self-overcoming so convincing that we will mistake automation for ascent. Man is something that shall be overcome: the human being, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, is not a fixed nature but a transition, a bridge, defined not by any settled essence but by the capacity to become—to take oneself as a task, to impose form upon one’s own chaos, to make of one’s life a created thing rather than a given one. Self-overcoming—
Selbstüberwindung—is this continual surpassing of what one currently is through sustained, painful, never-finished struggle against one’s own inertia and comfort. Self-automation is the structural opposite: the surpassing of one’s tasks by delegating them, arriving at the result without the formation. The output may be identical. The human is not. In self-overcoming,