Andreessen isn’t alone in dreaming of transcending humanity through technology. Nick Bostrom, founder of the Oxford University “Future of Humanity Institute,” has argued that posthuman life is not only “possible” and “desirable,” through the use of nanobots, AI or other technologies, but that “it could be very good for us to become posthuman.” Yuval Noah Harari, popular medieval-historian-turned-prophet-of-doom, predicts with some trepidation that in this century “the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s bewilderingly optimistic “AI visionary,” recently predicted that by 2045 we will have achieved “singularity,” where human and artificial intelligence will be so integrated that “we will … become superhuman.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the modern technological superman is most often associated with the archetype of the Silicon Valley mogul. On a podcast in 2022, Andreessen described Elon Musk as the closest thing we have to a Nietzschean Übermensch today. (Other candidates floated on the episode include Trump and Kanye.) What Andreessen admires about Musk is his dictatorial approach to running his companies, which he likens favorably to Nietzsche’s conception of “master morality.”
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