BIOCRACY - A Nietzschean Alignment : From Artificial Intelligence to Accelerated Independence

Sammanfattning

This thesis proposes a Nietzschean alignment and transvaluation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics through the novel ethical framework of Biocracy — aligning AI to foster an environment selecting the strengthening of our biological capacities towards human flourishing. Current dominant approaches in AI ethics emphasize fairness, accessibility, expediency or transhumanism — yet these frameworks fundamentally, even if unintentionally — accelerate the degeneration of human cognition as phenotypic skill atrophy in the short term, and in the longer term, if such cultural environments persist, relaxed selection will contribute to genotypic shifts across generations. The erosion of those very capacities — capacities that made humans distinctive as a species and enabled the development of AI itself (such as large language models, search engines, tutoring models or navigational aids which may either complement or compete with our biological cognition) — first leads to human decline before possibly into their subjugation or even extinction in the long run. Drawing from evolutionary theory and the philosophy of Nietzsche, I argue that AI should be designed as a complementary technology (eutech) — one that challenges users to strengthen their biological cognitive abilities (phenotypically) and fosters an environment selecting for them across generations (genotypically) — rather than as a competitive technology (dystech) that augments users with artificial cognitive abilities while diminishing and selecting against their biological ones. Through Biocratic Principles (adaptive challenge scaling, selective pressure implementation, and competence expiration), I advance a normative framework in which access to AI's augmenting capabilities is proportionally granted by the user's demonstrated biological competence. In this alignment, AI becomes a testing apparatus rather than a debilitating crutch — an evolutionary environment catalyzing human flourishing instead of decline in both short- and long-terms, fostering against competing alternatives not only our survival and dominance but, above all, life affirmation.