Nihilism and Technology

Book excerpt: Artificial intelligence. Robot workers. Commercial space travel. These are no longer ideas of science fiction. They are increasingly the headlines in the daily news. From Hollywood to higher education, everyone is racing to figure out how to exploit these new technologies and use them to solve all our problems—especially problems related to another subject dominating headlines: the climate change crisis. Given the existential threat of environmental disaster, we now look to the technologies we once thought impossible to do the impossible, to save us from climate change. Of course, looking to superhuman beings to save us from ourselves is nothing new. This is why turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism can help us to understand our current predicament, to understand the danger of trying to escape from reality by embracing technological fantasies. This updated edition expands the investigation into the relationship between nihilism and technology to include new topics like why AI doesn’t exist, why ChatGPT shouldn’t exist, and why climate change can’t be solved by nihilism.