Nietzsche and Artificial Intelligence: What Becomes of the Will to Power When Machines Remove the Struggle?

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 22 September 2026

Friedrich Nietzsche would probably have loved artificial intelligence before becoming appalled by what human beings did with it. He admired intelligence, creativity, audacity, self-transformation and the destruction of inherited intellectual conventions, while despising complacency, conformity and the desire to make life comfortable at the expense of making it meaningful. Artificial intelligence seems almost perfectly designed to excite both sides of this philosophical temperament because it simultaneously enlarges human capacities and offers us unprecedented opportunities to avoid exercising them.

AI is, among many other things, a machine for overcoming obstacles. It translates languages we have never learned, writes computer programs we could not have written ourselves, searches bodies of knowledge we could never personally read and increasingly performs intellectual tasks that previously demanded years of specialist training. It gives ordinary people capabilities that would have appeared supernatural throughout most of human history, and it does so without requiring them to acquire all the underlying skills from which those capabilities would traditionally have arisen.

This sounds like power, and Nietzsche was the philosopher of power. Yet his conception of power was considerably stranger than the ordinary political meaning of the word, because power was not simply the capacity to make other people obey, accumulate money or command armies. His notoriously difficult concept of the will to power concerned something deeper: striving, interpretation, self-overcoming, the imposition of form upon disorder and the continual transformation of oneself into something greater than one presently is.

This makes artificial intelligence philosophically troublesome. If human power emerges partly through overcoming resistance, then a technology whose principal attraction lies in removing resistance may simultaneously make us more powerful and deprive us of the process through which power is cultivated. This apparent contradiction may become one of the central philosophical questions of the artificial-intelligence age.

Nietzsche against comfort

Nietzsche was profoundly suspicious of comfort as an organising principle of civilisation. This is one reason why Thus Spoke Zarathustra introduces the disturbing figure of the “last man”, the complacent creature who has organised life around security, convenience and modest pleasures. The last man is not starving, persecuted or miserable; that is precisely what makes him interesting. He is comfortable, satisfied and no longer seriously aspires towards anything beyond the preservation of his satisfaction.

Nietzsche feared that civilisation might progressively remove danger, struggle, ambition and uncertainty until human beings ceased striving towards anything beyond immediate wellbeing. Such a civilisation might be peaceful, prosperous and technologically sophisticated while nevertheless representing, in Nietzsche’s terms, a profound diminution of the human type. It would have solved many of humanity’s traditional problems while quietly abolishing some of the conditions from which exceptional human beings emerge.

Artificial intelligence fits uncomfortably into this picture because one of its principal promises is frictionlessness. A person who needs to write a letter can have the machine draft it, while somebody confronting a foreign-language document can have it translated. A programmer can ask for code, a researcher can request a summary of hundreds of pages and somebody lacking ideas can ask a machine to produce ten of them within seconds. Each individual application may be useful and frequently liberating, but taken together they raise a Nietzschean question that technological discussions too rarely confront: how much difficulty can be removed from human existence before something essential to human development disappears with it?

The purpose of resistance

Human beings acquire many of their most valuable capacities through resistance. A pianist develops because the piano initially refuses to do what she wants, while a mathematician develops because the proof does not reveal itself immediately. A writer develops because language stubbornly refuses to arrange itself into precisely the right sequence, and an athlete develops because the body reaches its limits and must gradually be trained beyond them. Difficulty is therefore not merely an unfortunate obstacle separating an individual from a desired result; it is frequently the mechanism through which the individual becomes capable of producing that result.

This distinction is easily overlooked in discussions about technological efficiency. If the sole objective is the production of an essay, then a machine capable of producing it instantaneously may appear superior to a human being who requires three days. If the objective is the production of a philosopher, writer or educated person, however, the calculation becomes different, because the three days may have been the point.

During those three days the person reads, becomes confused, discovers contradictions, abandons arguments, encounters unexpected ideas and eventually understands the subject differently. The finished essay is only the visible residue of an invisible process of intellectual transformation, and artificial intelligence can increasingly provide the residue without requiring the transformation. Nietzsche would surely have recognised the danger in this distinction.

Nobody finds it paradoxical that exercise machines are valuable because they create resistance. We go to a gymnasium and deliberately make physical movements more difficult than they need to be, lifting objects that require moving nowhere, running on machines that take us no distance and cycling bicycles that remain stationary. The inefficiency is intentional because transportation is not the purpose; transformation of the body is.

Education has historically performed an analogous function for the mind, although we seldom describe it in these terms. The schoolchild solves an equation humanity solved centuries ago, reads a book whose conclusions could be summarised within minutes and writes an essay that no future employer will ever need. These exercises appear spectacularly inefficient if their purpose is merely to produce answers, but their actual purpose is to produce minds.

Artificial intelligence therefore creates an educational problem considerably deeper than plagiarism. The obvious concern is that pupils will ask machines to write their essays and thereby cheat, but the more important concern is that they may obtain correct answers without undergoing the intellectual resistance through which the capacity to think is formed. A civilisation that understands this may eventually have to rediscover the value of deliberate cognitive difficulty, just as a civilisation of abundant calories rediscovered the value of deliberately exhausting the body.

The intellectual gymnasium of the future may therefore include places where artificial intelligence is intentionally absent.

The hammer and the hand

Yet this argument can easily become sentimental, and Nietzsche was no sentimentalist. Human beings have always used tools to remove difficulty, and civilisation would be absurd if we refused them merely because hardship supposedly builds character. Nobody seriously proposes abandoning calculators so that accountants may strengthen their arithmetic, nor requiring architects to use slide rules, journalists to return to mechanical typewriters or households to abandon washing machines in the interests of spiritual development.

Technology frequently removes meaningless difficulty so that human beings can confront more interesting difficulty, and this distinction is crucial. A hammer makes the hand more powerful without destroying craftsmanship, a telescope expands vision without making astronomy intellectually trivial and computers permit mathematicians to undertake calculations of a complexity that would otherwise be impossible. The tool abolishes one frontier only to reveal another.

Artificial intelligence could operate in precisely the same way. The question is not whether it makes tasks easier, because that is what useful technologies generally do; the question is whether we use the capacity thereby released to escape difficulty altogether or to ascend towards more difficult things.

This distinction may determine whether AI produces Nietzsche’s last man or something closer to his ideal of self-overcoming.

When answers become cheap

The most intellectually powerful people in an AI civilisation may cease to be those who possess answers, because answers are rapidly becoming cheap. For most of human history, knowledge itself was scarce: books were expensive, libraries geographically limited, education restricted and specialist expertise difficult to acquire. An individual who knew the answer to an obscure question possessed something valuable simply because most people did not.

Artificial intelligence radically reduces this scarcity. A person can ask about Roman taxation, quantum mechanics, Ukrainian history, corporate law or Sanskrit grammar and obtain an intelligible response within seconds. The response may need verification, refinement or specialist correction, but the cost of obtaining a plausible first account has nevertheless collapsed.

What remains scarce is knowing what to ask and recognising which answers matter. This creates something Nietzsche might have appreciated: an aristocracy not necessarily of inherited rank, wealth or formal qualifications but of intellectual ambition. When everybody has access to extraordinarily capable machines, differences between people may increasingly arise from what they demand of those machines.

One person asks artificial intelligence to entertain him while another asks it to organise his correspondence. A third uses it to understand molecular biology, a fourth employs it to construct a business and a fifth uses it to investigate a philosophical problem nobody has previously formulated correctly. The underlying technology may be substantially similar, but the wills directing it are radically different.

AI may therefore magnify human differences rather than eliminate them. The machine supplies intellectual leverage, but leverage is useful only when somebody decides where it ought to be applied.

Who commands whom?

Nietzsche’s distinction between master morality and slave morality is amongst the most controversial aspects of his philosophy and is frequently caricatured. It was not a straightforward political programme under which some people ought literally to enslave others, but an examination of different ways in which values are created, particularly the contrast between affirmative value-creation and reactive moral systems formed in opposition to those perceived as powerful.

Artificial intelligence introduces an intriguing variation upon the underlying question because it forces us to ask who is actually commanding whom. At present the answer seems obvious: the human gives instructions and the machine executes them. Yet command is not identical to mastery, particularly where the person giving the orders becomes incapable of functioning without the servant who receives them.

A person who cannot write without AI, navigate without satellite guidance, remember without a search engine or make professional decisions without algorithmic advice may formally command his machines while becoming psychologically dependent upon them. The nominal master continues issuing instructions even as the servant becomes indispensable, and eventually it becomes unclear where the effective capacity resides.

This phenomenon is not unique to artificial intelligence. Human beings have always become dependent upon technologies, and most inhabitants of a modern city would be helpless if electricity, telecommunications and modern transport disappeared simultaneously. AI nevertheless differs in an important respect because previous technologies principally substituted for physical capacities or specialised calculations, whereas artificial intelligence increasingly substitutes for judgement, expression, memory and thought: the faculties through which human beings understand themselves as agents.

The danger is therefore not necessarily that machines will rebel against us. It is that humans may gradually forget how to command them in any meaningful sense.

The Übermensch and the machine

No Nietzschean concept has been more abused than the Übermensch, conventionally translated as the “overman” or “superman”. It is better understood not as a biological master race but as an ideal associated with self-overcoming: humanity as something unfinished that might be surpassed through the creation of new values and forms of life.

Artificial intelligence presents two radically different interpretations of this idea. The first is that AI represents the greatest instrument of human self-overcoming yet invented, because humanity has externalised aspects of intelligence into machines and can thereby extend its cognitive capacities beyond some of the limitations of the unaided biological brain. Scientists can reason with computational assistance, artists can explore thousands of variations upon an idea and individuals can obtain intellectual resources previously available only to substantial institutions.

In this interpretation, artificial intelligence is not the Übermensch but the ladder by which human beings might climb towards forms of intellectual achievement previously beyond them. The machine expands the horizon of possible ambition, and its value lies not in replacing human striving but in allowing human striving to address larger problems.

The second possibility is darker. Instead of using machines to surpass ourselves, we may use them to avoid becoming anything at all. AI could become an enormous apparatus for intellectual passivity, producing entertainment, opinions, decisions and creative material on demand while human beings progressively retreat into consumption. In that world artificial intelligence would not create Nietzsche’s Übermensch; it would industrialise the conditions of the last man.

Creation after automation

Nietzsche placed enormous importance upon creation. The higher individual does not merely discover values waiting somewhere in the universe but interprets, creates and imposes form upon existence. This raises an obvious question when machines themselves become capable of generating music, pictures, prose, computer programs and increasingly sophisticated arguments.

One possibility is that machine creativity will devalue human creation. If an artificial intelligence can generate a competent symphony within seconds, then merely producing something resembling a symphony may cease to carry the cultural significance it once possessed. The same could become true of illustrations, novels, films and innumerable other products of intellectual labour.

But this assumes that the value of creation lies entirely in the object created, and Nietzsche gives us reasons to doubt that. The value of making something may lie partly in what creation does to the creator. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is valuable to us because we can hear it, but composing it was also an event within Beethoven’s own life. Creation is simultaneously outward and inward: the artist creates the work and, through the struggle of creating it, creates himself.

A machine may therefore be capable of giving us something resembling the work without undergoing our self-transformation for us. This distinction may become increasingly important as synthetic cultural production becomes ubiquitous, because human art may acquire a new kind of value precisely where we know that a human being struggled to make it. Imperfection itself may eventually acquire prestige as evidence that an artefact emerged from a life rather than from a computation.

Amor fati in a predictive world

Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, or love of fate, provides another unexpected perspective upon artificial intelligence. Nietzsche did not merely counsel passive acceptance of whatever happens; the ideal was something more radical, an affirmative relationship with necessity and a willingness to embrace one’s life rather than endlessly wishing it had been otherwise.

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is increasingly a technology of prediction and optimisation. We use intelligence to reduce uncertainty, avoid undesirable outcomes and arrange circumstances according to preference. Medicine predicts disease so that it may be prevented, finance predicts risk so that losses may be avoided, navigation predicts traffic so that inconvenience may be escaped and recommendation systems predict preferences so that boredom may be minimised.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, but a civilisation organised increasingly around prediction may gradually develop an intolerance of contingency. Life becomes something to optimise, with accidents understood primarily as failures of prediction and inefficiencies treated as technical defects waiting to be removed.

Nietzsche would surely have been suspicious of such an ambition because chance, error, misfortune and unintended encounters are not merely defects in human existence. They are among the forces from which identities emerge. A person travels somewhere by mistake and meets somebody who changes his life, a career fails and another begins or an argument is lost and an assumption collapses. An algorithm optimising one’s life according to existing preferences might protect a person from precisely those experiences capable of transforming the preferences themselves.

Perfect prediction could therefore become a prison constructed from our former selves.

Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence sharpens the paradox. Rather than affirming whatever life brings, contemporary technological culture increasingly promises to optimise what will happen before it occurs. We seek the best route, the best restaurant, the most compatible romantic partner, the most profitable investment and the most relevant information, while algorithms promise to reduce the role of error.

Yet human biographies are constructed through mistakes as much as successes. Love affairs that should not have happened, journeys that went wrong, jobs that proved disastrous and friendships formed by accident frequently become central chapters in the stories people tell about themselves. The perfectly optimised life might therefore suffer from a peculiar emptiness because nothing genuinely unexpected happens: the machine has become too good at understanding what we already wanted.

AI as a Dionysian force

There is nevertheless another possibility, and it is considerably more Nietzschean. Artificial intelligence may not ultimately produce order at all; it may produce chaos.

Once billions of people possess machines capable of generating ideas, businesses, images, software, political arguments, scientific hypotheses and cultural artefacts at extraordinary speed, the result may be an explosion of experimentation rather than conformity. The future may become less predictable precisely because vastly more people acquire the power to alter it.

AI could therefore become something almost Dionysian: an engine of proliferation, destruction and recombination that dissolves established cultural boundaries faster than institutions can reconstruct them. Professions may collapse while new professions appear, artistic forms may mutate, languages may blend, institutions may lose monopolies over expertise and individuals previously excluded from intellectual life may suddenly acquire formidable capabilities.

This would not be the comfortable technological world of the last man. It might instead be destabilising, exhausting and terrifyingly creative, and Nietzsche might have found far more to admire in it.

Artificial intelligence is frequently discussed as though access to the same technology will necessarily produce greater equality, but there are reasons to doubt this. Give two people the same library and they will not read the same books; give them the same university and they will not acquire the same education; give them the same freedom and they will not construct the same lives. Give them the same artificial intelligence and they will not ask it the same questions.

AI amplifies intention. A curious person becomes capable of investigating more, an ambitious entrepreneur of building more, a propagandist of producing more propaganda and a scientist of exploring more hypotheses. The machine does not abolish differences of character and purpose; it may magnify them.

This may become one of the defining inequalities of the artificial-intelligence age: not merely inequality of access to intelligence but inequality in the purposes to which intelligence is directed. Once knowledge and computational assistance become abundant, the scarce resource may increasingly become will.

Who is doing the thinking?

There is an uncomfortable test that every habitual user of artificial intelligence might occasionally apply. After completing a difficult task with AI, he might ask whether he could explain what he has just done without the machine. If he can, the machine may genuinely have amplified his intellectual power; if he cannot, something more ambiguous has occurred because the result has been obtained while the underlying capacity may reside partly elsewhere.

This distinction will become increasingly difficult to recognise because AI assistance can feel like personal competence. The machine responds immediately to our instructions and its outputs appear upon our screens, so the psychological experience is one of increased ability. Yet borrowed power is not necessarily possessed power, any more than occupying a place is necessarily equivalent to having acquired the ability to reach it.

A person carried to the summit of a mountain occupies precisely the same geographical position as the climber. Only one of them has climbed it, and Nietzsche cared about the climbing.

The artificial-intelligence age may therefore produce an unexpected revival of deliberate intellectual restriction. People may choose periods without algorithmic assistance, writers may draft unaided before consulting machines, students may solve problems themselves before comparing their reasoning with AI and artists may impose arbitrary restrictions upon their tools precisely to force originality.

The purpose would not be technological nostalgia but cognitive training. We already understand the principle physically: the existence of cars does not make walking obsolete and the existence of lifts does not make stairs harmful. Sometimes we deliberately choose the less efficient method because efficiency is not the only value, and the same principle may have to be extended to thought.

The will behind the machine

Artificial intelligence does not abolish Nietzsche’s will to power. It may instead make the concept more important because machines can increasingly supply knowledge, language, calculation, memory and substantial elements of reasoning while leaving unanswered the most fundamental human question: what are these capacities for?

A machine can help someone write a book but cannot, without adopting values derived from human purposes, decide whether his life ought to be devoted to writing one. It can construct arguments but cannot independently determine which questions deserve the expenditure of a human lifetime. It can optimise a journey while remaining dependent upon some prior account of where civilisation ought ultimately to go.

The decisive locus of human power may therefore migrate upwards from execution towards intention. As machines become better at answering how, human beings become increasingly responsible for answering why. This is not a diminution of human responsibility but an intensification of it, because the consequences of our purposes become greater as the means available for pursuing them become more powerful.

The deepest danger of artificial intelligence may consequently not be that machines become too powerful. It may be that human beings become too comfortable. A civilisation surrounded by endlessly capable assistants could gradually cease cultivating the capacities those assistants replace: memory could weaken because everything is retrievable, writing because everything is generatable, judgement because everything is recommendable and curiosity because every question receives an immediate answer.

This would be a Nietzschean nightmare not because technology had failed but because it had succeeded too completely. Humanity would possess extraordinary powers while becoming increasingly incapable of exercising them independently, surrounded by instruments of unprecedented intellectual strength but progressively uncertain about what purposes those instruments ought to serve.

There is, however, another future. Artificial intelligence might remove trivial struggles so that human beings can undertake greater ones. It might abolish intellectual drudgery while expanding the frontier of possible ambition, giving an individual something approaching the research capacity of an institution, the linguistic range of a polyglot and computational powers exceeding those available to entire previous generations.

Then the question becomes what that individual chooses to do with them. Nietzsche’s challenge survives the arrival of artificial intelligence almost unchanged because the important question was never simply how much power a person possesses; it was what sort of person he becomes through exercising it.

Machines may remove obstacles from the road ahead, but humanity must decide whether the purpose is to make the journey easier or to travel further. The last man will use artificial intelligence to eliminate every difficulty from his life and congratulate himself upon the resulting comfort, while the more ambitious human being will use the same machine to reach difficulties that no unaided person could previously have confronted.

Both will possess artificial intelligence and both will appear technologically empowered, but they will represent radically different relationships between humanity and its machines. The decisive struggle of the artificial-intelligence age may therefore not be a struggle between humans and machines at all, but a struggle within humanity between two uses of the machine: artificial intelligence as the final instrument of comfort and artificial intelligence as the greatest instrument of human ambition yet devised.

Technology cannot decide between those futures because technology cannot determine what we ought to want from it. Nietzsche’s question consequently remains where it always was, directed not towards the instrument but towards the person holding it: whether greater power will make us merely more comfortable, or whether we will use it to become something greater than we were before.

That remains an act of will.