I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil.

It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left.

Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.

> 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?

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.

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.

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...

What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.

But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.

Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)

Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...

-- SICP

I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.

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 know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.

Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)

I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.

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 hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.

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.

According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.

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?

AI labs, I await your offers ;)

This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.

“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”

Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.

Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.

High level abstraction and novelty.

More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.

Ephemera

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.

Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297

That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?