alt Hacker NewsThe Revenge of the Philosophy Majors
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This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.
> While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
But wait, there's this:
> Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
So, between 6 and 12 each?
I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.
Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors.
Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge
I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.
For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.
I would much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.
I got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now
One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school. Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood
"Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers."
I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.
From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?
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"the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into"...
There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...