An Unexamined Utopia: Marx, Nietzsche, Camus, and the Age of AI

Setting the Scene

Anthropic just recently released a blog/editorial where they made the claim that the pace of AI development has become orders of magnitude faster than ever before with the help of models building themselvesIt should be noted that their measurement of this was lines of code written by Claude, a metric they themselves admitted to not be a perfect standard for progress. This, to myself and many people, has always seemed inevitable. However, I don't think many people anticipated it happening so early. If AI is really advancing at a rate so fast that the leading frontier lab is calling for a standstillAt a very opportune time, given their upcoming IPO, it's hard not to get a little existential.

The thought occurred to me: What would happen if the majority of white collar jobs are rendered obsolete? Even further, what if all jobs were increasingly automated by artificial intelligence and robotics? To answer this question, we'll consider a scenario where somewhere in the near (hypothetical) future human labor is no longer needed. For the sake of our conversation, we will assume a few things:

• There will be some sort of UBI that supplies everyone with a livable (but not too much in excess) wage without rampant inflation or increase in prices
• Access to essential services remains available to everyone (healthcare, education, etc.)
• Energy, compute, and material goods are cheap and abundantPerhaps the strongest assumption of them all
• Humanity remains autonomous and in control of AI and Robotic systemsWe're not heading towards real-world Terminator

Given the scenario and the axioms in the system, the rest of this blog will be a hypothetical overview on how three philosophers would view and react to this "AI Utopia". I would like to note that while I am generally interested in philosophy, I am by no means an expert on these philosophers, namely Marx, Nietzsche, and Camus, so if you disagree I would love to talk more about it. With that being said, let's do it.

AI Marx the Spot

At first glance, it seems like Karl Marx would love such a scenario. As the author of The Communist Manifesto, Marx centered his philosophy around the tension between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Of course, both the upper and working classes looked a bit different back when Marx was around, but the ideas hold. The underlying fundamentals of Marxism lie in the concept of historical materialism. The premise of this idea is that through history, society empirically moves through inevitable stages that are defined by material conditions. These "material conditions" are the forces that control the relationship between the working class and the elites.

Marx famously held that the gap between the bourgeoisie and proletariat was accentuated and sped up with the practice of capitalism. Very interestingly, he boldly claimed that the persistent practice of capitalism would eventually create a divide so large that the system would break. Of course, it's hard to imagine that Marx was envisioning the rapid rise to power of Anthropic and OpenAI, but his prophecy, at least in this scenario, holds true. That is to say that, in this utopia, society has clearly moved away from capitalism and toward communism, though it remains neither fully capitalist nor fully communist. If Marx were to be revived in this utopia, he would probably say something like, "Of course! The capitalist incentivization to maximize profit and automate labor guaranteed this reality and it was only a matter of time before this happened".

But would he be happy? At a surface level, it seems like this is what Marx wanted all along. A society free from entfremdungThis translates directly to "alienation," a concept Marx used to describe how capitalism harms humanity by forcing workers to sell their time and labor for a wage, separating them from their creative potential. and material scarcity was central to Marx's vision of communism, so why is it not so cut-and-dry? The simple answer: the fate of this society is still in the air. The most important trait of this society to Marx has not yet been established: what is the relation between the working class and the elites? In regards to the material conditions, how benevolent or malicious this world would be depends on one truth: who owns the means of production? If AI and Robotics have become so commoditized that the power over the compute, servers, and any other means to support advanced technology is held in the power of people, then to Marx we have truly reached utopia. However, if companies like Anthropic or OpenAI unilaterally control and operate these systems, then we are strictly worse-off than before.

Society, in effect, would be standing on a knife's edge. Allowing tech conglomerates to retain private ownership over the models and compute would render the rest of humanity powerless. Marx would treat the UBI received as a sort of dystopian sedation method that keeps the people under control, while the vast amount of humanity loses all agency. He would say that we have reduced ourselves to simple pets of the corporate elite. Yet this does not have to be the case. If AI is put into the hands of society and has become common property, Marx would view this as the realization of true communism. There would be no sole company that maintains or exerts power over the "working" class, and humans would be able to pursue their passions and loves that they previously did not have time for. A literal quote from Marx was, in a society like this, someone could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic"Or you don't even have to hunt at all. A society free from class struggle and economic domination is much closer to what Marx envisioned. However, not everyone agrees that this would be a good thing.

Dying of Comfort

Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influentialSo influential, in fact, that other philosophers are sometimes qualified as "pre" or "post" Nietzsche late modern philosophers, held strong beliefs on morality and individualism. He is most known for his proclamation that "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him". In this, he means that the post-Enlightenment society has rationalized away God through the progress of science and technology. This, to Nietzsche, has left humanity to fend for themselves and has forced individuals to create meaning for themselves. Thus, he ended up spending a lot of time thinking about meaning and purpose in a world where God is dead.

One of the works where he explores these ideas is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche introduces a prophecy of what will inevitably happen to humanity when society becomes completely comfortable and living becomes "easy". Der Letzte Mensch, which translates to "The Last Man", is a person, an archetype in this society who craves nothing more than a comfortable life, entertainment, and safety. The Last Man hates suffering, and, to Nietzsche, has thus robbed himself of purpose. Not only do they go through life mechanically and monotonously, the Last Man distracts himself from true meaning through cheap and effortless pleasure, all the while he surrenders his own individuality with the rest of the last men. In a world where Marx believes joy is in abundance, Nietzsche sees a spiritual death sentence.

Why is suffering so important then? Is UBI not a good thing? If we maintain healthcare and education, have we really lost purpose? Suffering, to Nietzsche, is an inherent, necessary prerequisite for human greatness. Just as muscles are broken down in training and rebuilt stronger, so too do the human spirit and purpose refine themselves in the face of struggle. Nietzsche actually embraced the idea of Amor Fati, or "love of fate", to express just how important it is to accept and affirm all aspects of life. The painful, chaotic, and difficult parts of life are exactly what it means to be alive. What we admire about the greats in any field, from sports, to music, to art, to anything is the struggle and the hill it took to become great. So not only would Nietzsche reject the idea of this society being a "utopia," but he would also distrust a world in which AI creates art effortlessly, because it robs humanity of the process of trying, failing, and overcoming through which greatness is forged.

To demonstrate the embodiment of embracing suffering, Nietzsche coined the concept of the Will to Power, or what he considered to be the innate human drive to master oneself, to overcome obstacles, to expand, and to forge yourself into something grand. Thus, he introduces the foil to the Last Man: his famous Übermensch. The Übermensch, or "Overman", is the individual who stares into the void of existence and outright rejects the comfortable values of the herd. He creates his own values through intense personal struggle and discipline. The only saving grace of this scenario, then, is that humanity has retained free will and agency to do as they please. Even though Nietzsche would argue that UBI would almost institutionalize "herd mentality" and incentivizes staying small and comfortable, he would not surrender all hope. Even if humanity has no mountains left to climb and no true obstacles to jump over, the Will to Power would remain, internal and lurking in all of humanity, resulting in mass depression and existential rot unless acted upon.

In a sense, Nietzsche and Marx would agree that humanity is walking on the edge of a knife, just for different reasons. Marx worries about whether corporate monopoly or public ownership wins the outer world; meanwhile, Nietzsche worries about the battle inside us: whether humanity will allow comfort to sedate our spirits, or choose to use our remaining agency to manufacture our own struggles, climb our own psychological peaks, and conquer the void.

What!? That's Absurd!

In a world where Marx analyzes the plumbing of society and Nietzsche preaches for the psychological necessity of pain, existentialist philosopher Albert Camus simply says, "You're overthinking it". Camus' flagship philosophy, Absurdism, stems from the belief that it is human nature to force meaning on a universe that is fundamentally cold, silent, and meaningless. Even if you haven't read much philosophy, chances are that you've heard the phrase, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Sisyphus, condemned by the gods for eternity, is trapped in a form of labor whose outcome is predetermined and forever futile. His labor produces nothing and has no impact on anyone else; it simply is what it is. However, Camus posits that instead of infinite despair, Sisyphus is delighted. Not because of a Nietzschean sense of purpose through suffering, but because he accepts that this eternal damnation is completely and beautifully meaningless.

The utopian predicament, to Camus, is much simpler than how Marx and Nietzsche interpret it. There is no loss of meaning from a pre-utopian society to a post-utopian one; it is just as meaningless as it was before. Camus does not advocate for any escape. In fact, this defiance is what his entire book, The Myth of Sisyphus, is about. He understands that in an AI utopia, the sudden shock of absolute leisure might initially drive people to escape either physically or philosophically. But Camus would view this spike in existential dread not as a fundamental tragedy, but as a symptom of humanity losing its favorite distraction.

For centuries, the grueling demands of economic survival and class mobility masqueraded as our "meaning." With AI taking over the heavy lifting, those artificial scaffolding systems collapse. Yet, in this total vacuum of structural purpose, Camus would argue that humanity hasn't lost its way; rather, it has finally found its true baseline. In losing the forced labor that once manufactured a false sense of duty, humanity is finally left alone with the ultimate reality: the Absurd.

As Nietzsche and Marx squabble over how to align humanity to its inherent nature in this world, Camus would sit back and laugh at their meaningless conversation in a meaningless universe. If, by accepting the Absurd, we stop panicking about the purpose of our hobbies or who controls the power, then, to Camus, we have reached a utopia. In doing so, we free ourselves from our innate compulsion to manufacture meaning, leaving us to live with ephemeral passion and love until our days are over.