philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now?

... One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.” ...

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.

DeepMind’s staff cogitators have specialties ranging from moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of science to the ethics of genomics and A.I. ethics and animal cognition. ...

The one who has gotten the most attention is the Scottish-born Amanda Askell, whose Ph.D. from N.Y.U. concerned “Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics” and who, having left OpenAI to become an early employee of Anthropic in 2021, largely wrote and oversees a 23,000-word constitution that plays a key role in Claude’s “moral formation.” ...

He and his colleagues are now looking in artificial minds for processes similar to those found in human and animal minds: preferences, introspection, metacognition (thinking about thinking) and so on. ...

One thing Mr. Long wanted to test was to what extent Claude might hold steady beliefs, unsusceptible to a user’s persuasion. ...

 “We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments. ...

Instead, he moves from how humans have experiences, to how it seems like a lot of animals have experiences, to how “there’s this interesting question of: What if something wasn’t even alive? It was made out of metal, but it processed information and reacted to its environments and talked to us. What would we say about something like that?” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html