# Also Sprach Zarathustra

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/also-sprach-zarathustra
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-04-15

## Summary

This 2025 essay by Jeanyoon Choi describes an accelerating technological treadmill and a twentieth-century Taylorist order in which work, education and housing turned people into interchangeable components. It proposes that AI, by taking over repetitive operations, could be disastrous for employment but might also free people from being valued only as parts. Drawing on the camel, lion and child of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it frames the hoped-for shift as moving from servant to creator of systems, valuing divergence, uncertainty and play.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 니체 『차라투스트라는 이렇게 말했다』의 낙타·사자·아이를 통해, AI가 반복 노동을 대체하는 시대에 인간이 시스템의 부품에서 시스템을 창조하는 존재로 나아갈 가능성을 논한다.

## Concepts defined

- **Hyper-Sisyphus**: Choi's image for the accelerating, never-ending treadmill of technological innovation in which people enclose themselves.

## Questions this answers

### How does Jeanyoon Choi use Nietzsche's camel, lion and child to discuss AI?

In 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', Choi maps the camel to people carrying the burdens of systems, the lion to a freedom that cannot yet create, and the child to play and affirmation that makes self-turning wheels, or systems. He hopes AI can open a path to that creative position.

### Can AI free people from Taylorist work?

Jeanyoon Choi argues that AI replacing repetitive labour can be disastrous for employment, but may also release people from an industrial-engineering ideology that reduces a person's value to their function as a component, prompting a move from servant to creator of systems.

Topics: taylorism, artificial intelligence and labour, creation of systems, technological acceleration, nietzsche's three metamorphoses, large language models

References: [Thus Spoke Zarathustra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra), [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Scientific management (Taylorism)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management), [Le Corbusier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier), [The Crystal Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace), Banpo Xi, [Sisyphus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus)

## Full text

To say that we live in a world of confusion and chaos has become a cliché. Innovation continues in California, but it is becoming difficult to tell whether it serves humanity or simply serves further innovation. The technological treadmill accelerates without stopping. The growing number of people thrown off it hardly seems to matter: its supply and demand can be sustained by the products of another treadmill, such as automated agents. This is a dystopia of continuous acceleration. Yet every dystopia contains a trace of utopia.

Taylorism turned human beings into machines. Employment became a kind of feudal arrangement for the twentieth century, and people became components in a hierarchy of positions. Much blue- and white-collar work consisted of repeated operations performed with a restricted set of skills. We were servants of systems. Education, too, pursued the mass production of suitable components: solve as many problems as possible, as accurately as possible, within a fixed time. Housing, leisure, and fashion followed the same logic. Do we not take pride in living in a Corbusian prison—in Banpo Xi, for instance?

If artificial intelligence can be useful to humanity, one possibility lies in its capacity to replace the repetitive labour required to produce and sustain simulacra. Algorithms increasingly perform the operations through which these systems continue. This can be disastrous for employment and the present economy. But it might also release us from an industrial-engineering ideology that reduces a person's existential value to their function as a component. The servant of the system is liberated—or dismissed. At that moment, the value of the person as a being-for-itself must be reconsidered. We also possess technologies through which an individual's ideas can become tangible unusually quickly.

From servant to creator of systems; from being-in-itself to being-for-itself; from component to mechanism; from part to whole. Constraints of physical capital can give way to the creation of proliferating relationships of meaning. The modernist insistence on rationality, optimisation, and correct answers can yield to nonlinearity, unexpectedness, and an affirmation of uncertainty: a tongue stuck out at the Crystal Palace. Let machines calculate and repeat. A human lifetime is already too short for all the questions we might ask. Machines could bring these thought experiments into contact with practical experiments, perhaps helping us confront problems we have not yet learned to solve.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra speaks of the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel carries its burdens through the desert, accepting the command that it must obey. The lion seeks freedom and says that it wills, but cannot yet create what it desires. The child creates: innocence, forgetting, play, affirmation, a wheel that turns by itself. Rather than remaining inside the wheel, the child makes self-turning wheels—systems—as an act of play. If I can retain hope for the coming age, it is through this possibility of a humanity capable of creation, affirmation, and laughter. Zarathustra spoke a century and a half ago. It is our turn to respond.

The arrival of large language models makes the need for another approach urgent. Tools can already perform substantial portions of design, development, and administrative work. When constraints and objectives are fixed, solving the prescribed problem faster is an increasingly fragile basis for human value. Against regression toward the mean, I am interested in divergence from it: asking and defining questions where a relationship was not expected.

We need to transform ourselves before change is imposed on us. This accelerating hyper-Sisyphus shows how thoroughly we have enclosed ourselves in the treadmill of a hyperobject. The dystopian comedy retains a distinctly utopian colour.

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.