alt Hacker News> 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?
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It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design