> 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?
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
That's the in-house style for the WSJ
FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.
The irony
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.
I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments
This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.
In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.
In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.
The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.
It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.
It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
Now I program to be less stochastic
:)
(Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.
I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough.
Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.
I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
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...
I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.
there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman
it is a way of thinking
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
It's not about learning "more". It's that earning a degree is an academic undertaking whereas working at a coffee shop is "real life".
There is no need to treat one as more or less valuable/useful than the other. They're just different kinds of human experiences. Learning is possible from both.
If you meant doing a service job at a small business, where you can have real ownership over how it treats its customers, I would agree with you.
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 wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
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.
Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
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
I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
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.
Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.
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.
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".
It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it).
I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”.
The problems, are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
https://ia803103.us.archive.org/23/items/philosophicalinvest...
It's also the case that Wittgenstein left academic philosophy, as did Richard Rorty.
If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I'm not sure why you're quoting the quote that I just quoted. I was hoping for an analysis.
> If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I said that they left academic philosophy. Rorty didn't leave academia entirely. But yes, I left academic philosophy too, so in a sense I am telling on myself, though I don't accept the negative connotation.
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?
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?