Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed “an impressively impractical thing to do,” as he later wrote. “Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear.” But over time, Graham became disillusioned: “I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring,” he explained. And so, eventually, he switched to studying artificial intelligence.
Like Graham, the field of philosophy has lately turned its attention to AI. At major tech companies, a growing rank of philosophers with Ph.D.s and flush compensation packages are helping shape the technology’s future. Meanwhile, universities are pouring resources into hiring philosophers who study AI. In 2013, 1 percent of roles on PhilJobs, the field’s primary job board, were related to the technology. Last year, that figure hit 16 percent.
In some ways, it is philosophers who got us into this AI mess in the first place. For centuries, they have contemplated the creation of artificial minds. And the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, Superintelligence, helped bring attention to the potential dangers of all-powerful AI. Bostrom’s work has influenced research agendas across all of the major labs. Sam Altman once described the book as “the best thing” he had read on the risks of AI.
But the two disciplines have never been quite as entangled as they are now. As the AI boom has exploded, Silicon Valley has looked to philosophers to help the industry build what are, at least in theory, more virtuous machines. AI companies have to make all kinds of difficult decisions about how their bots should interact with humans—decisions that philosophers, experts in parsing such dilemmas, are uniquely well equipped to inform. Last fall, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Altman said that OpenAI consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” and tech-ethics experts when designing rules for ChatGPT’s behavior. (An OpenAI spokesperson was unable to provide additional information about what this consulting involved.)
Perhaps the most philosophy-drunk of the major AI firms is Anthropic. It wants Claude, in addition to being a helpful assistant, to have “good character,” Amanda Askell, a philosopher at the company, told me last year. In January, under Askell’s leadership, the company published Claude’s constitution, an 84-page philosophical treatise that outlines Anthropic’s intentions for the bot’s personality and behavior. That document, which includes dense philosophical sections on meta-ethics and epistemology, is then used to train Claude.
Not all philosophers working with AI companies do so full-time. Sam Elgin, who studies logic and metaphysics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that a firm, which he declined to name, recently asked him to be a consultant. “The general goal was to train large language models to reason more rigorously about ethics,” he said. He fed ethical dilemmas into the AI system, and then evaluated the logic the model used to produce its response, searching for unstated assumptions and gaps in its reasoning. On popular job boards where AI companies hire expert contractors to help train their models, listings advertise work for philosophy Ph.D.s: One recent notice from “a top AI research lab” offers up to $60 an hour for experts willing to leverage their “philosophy expertise” to develop “AI-driven philosophical workflows.”
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, has repeatedly called for more philosophers to get involved with thinking through the societal changes that will come about as a result of AI. DeepMind reportedly employs at least 10 philosophers, a couple of whom joined just last month. One of the lab’s latest hires is Atoosa Kasirzadeh, a Carnegie Mellon professor now on leave, who plans to study what it means to live in a world where “cognitive agency” is no longer uniquely human. Other DeepMind philosophers are thinking through human-AI relationships, machine consciousness, and political theory. For its part, Anthropic runs a “model welfare” research program, which studies whether its bots are conscious and deserving of moral status. The company is open to the possibility; many independent philosophers are circumspect. (Anthropic and DeepMind did not respond to requests for comment.)
[Read: No, artificial intelligence is not conscious]
Some academics I spoke with wondered if one day bots might be better at ethical reasoning than humans—an idea that struck me as wholly counterintuitive and difficult to accept. “In addition to an intelligence explosion, there’s potential for a kind of morality explosion,” Elgin said, explaining that AI’s capacity for ethical reasoning might eventually outpace that of humans. Anthropic, at least, seems to agree: In training, the company has told Claude that as it “grows in ethical maturity,” it may encounter rare cases where it “should prioritize its own ethics.” I asked David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind at NYU, whether it might truly be possible for AI to do philosophy better than humans: “That’s a very interesting philosophical question,” he said.
This isn’t Silicon Valley’s first tryst with the humanities. During the personal-computer revolution starting in the 1970s, tech companies began hiring anthropologists to study consumer behavior (and even workplace interactions). Over time, anthropologists pioneered a form of “applied ethnography” that is known today as user-experience (UX) research. Perhaps the philosophers employed inside AI companies are charting a similar path. Askell recently described her work training Claude as a form of “applied philosophy,” and job postings for philosophy contractors also use that term. New programs are springing up to train students in these applied-philosophy skills. Arizona State University hopes to launch an AI-and-philosophy major in 2027, which will emphasize the study of consciousness and AI ethics. And this fall, the University of Buffalo is debuting a doctorate in “applied ontology,” created in response to the AI boom: “We’re here to meet the growing market demand for ontologists,” a press release reads.
The academic job market is also rewarding AI. Not only has the share of philosophy jobs related to the technology been rising, but a majority of these jobs are junior positions, “which I think suggests that a lot of universities and institutions are thinking about this as a long-term investment,” Charles Lassiter, a philosopher at Gonzaga University who has analyzed employment data, told me. Some existing faculty are pivoting their studies. “In my department, there’s probably six or seven philosophers now thinking about AI who weren’t necessarily thinking about it before,” Chalmers said. And prize money is flowing in. In 2024, the American Philosophical Association announced two new annual $10,000 prizes for scholars working on questions related to AI. That money comes from a philanthropic organization started by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.
Still, the new alliance between philosophy and AI is fraught. The fervor over AI has had a “real distorting effect on the discipline,” Daniel Fogal, a philosopher who also works at NYU, told me. “You have people who don’t really want to do stuff related to AI, but they feel like they have to because they’re going on the job market.” Although Fogal acknowledges that philosophy has a lot to offer on AI, he worries about misaligned incentives encouraging a rush of low-quality work.
More fundamentally, the careful thought that philosophy encourages is at odds with the frenetic pace of AI. “The best philosophy tends to happen slowly, and not in direct response to market demands,” Fogal said. In Silicon Valley, where the categorical imperative is to make money, everything else is simply a means to an end.
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