You know we’re out of our depth when we bring in the philosophers.
That’s kind of the field’s whole schtick. It’s only philosophy until we have a handle on it, at which point we call it something else: mathematics, physics, economics... Even computer science was once philosophy, growing out of formal logic, a key part of the philosopher’s toolkit.
The New York Times ran a piece by Benjamin Wallace today called “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors,” about the work philosophers are doing at AI companies.
Except that this piece ran in the Business section, so it’s even more about how much they’re getting paid to do it — up to $429,000, in the cases Wallace could confirm — and about how they got to be in that position.
As a practical matter, everyone quoted here still cautions against a career plan of specializing only in philosophy. The thinkers making the big bucks have had one foot in the AI camp for a while, exploring questions of machine intelligence and its implications.
How should we feel about their work?
Well, readers of the article might reasonably wonder why the companies would seek answers to questions about topics like AI consciousness and suffering when the answers could prove very inconvenient to their business models. It’s complicated, and not very clearly spelled out in the article. So here’s my best sense of the situation:
Many of the leaders at AI companies, especially Anthropic, have real ethical concerns about their work. They are probably looking into the welfare of their models at least in part out of an actual sense of moral obligation.
Many top figures at these same AI companies are also concerned about the risks of superhuman AIs pursuing interests not aligned with our own. They are looking to philosophers for ideas on how to approach the problem that aren’t just “stop making smarter AIs.” Most famously, part of Claude’s training involves a virtue-ethics themed Constitution written principally by Anthropic’s top philosopher, Amanda Askell.
Philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about thinking. Companies making thinking machines also spend a lot of time thinking about thinking. Philosophers can gain insight playing with these new kinds of minds, and those insights can potentially translate into performance improvements for said minds.
So there’s really no easy narrative I can give you about how philosophers taking AI money are selling their souls or fighting a good fight. Depending on the situation, it could be one or the other, or a bit of both.
But reading pieces like this one, my impression of the philosophers as people is almost always positive. It makes me wish the AI companies were coming at this new science of AI in the traditional way — philosophy first — instead of racing at full speed with a few philosophers strapped in for the ride.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.