A Philosophers hype in the age of AI?

One of the reasons we might be seeing more philosophers — or, perhaps more accurately, more philosophical questions being raised — is that, beyond the obvious fact that big Silicon Valley companies are chasing AGI and increasingly concerned about (and being sued over) its moral implications, technology itself is undergoing a significant shift in the way software has been built over the past decades.

As we move toward approaches that are increasingly linguistic rather than hard-coded, complexity is gradually shifting toward the expressiveness of language itself: its imbrications, syntactic diversity, and semantic pluralism. This is a territory with which most software developers are not necessarily familiar. If you need to explain, in considerable detail, how different entities relate to one another, establish their boundaries, define their properties, and describe their behavior in an unambiguous way so that your preferred agentic copilot can actually code alongside you, philosophy becomes quite useful.

Not because of some historical expertise you might acquire by reading Aristotle or Kant, but because of the actual object philosophers deal with — at least, following the way Deleuze and Guattari understand it: concepts and the activity of conceptualization itself.

This is, in a sense, the bare-bones activity of philosophy. Whenever philosophers investigate a field, a problem, or even the work of another philosopher, they must define concepts, establish boundaries around ideas, distinguish between apparently minor differences that can make a major difference in a broader conceptual framework, and identify the relationships that hold everything together. This particular sensibility is what makes philosophy, in my view, such a useful activity across a wide range of fields.

Philosophy is not merely about historical insights, as most popular philosophy bestsellers might want you to believe. Nor is it restricted to ethical clarification or providing guidance on complicated moral questions.

But here is where I think we should be a little more cautious about the current hype.

The truth is that the market does not necessarily need philosophers for most of these positions. What companies need are people capable of engaging deeply with the behavioral, social, and moral implications of the systems they are building. And, of course, there is also a rather pragmatic dimension to this: AI companies are increasingly being held accountable for the actions and consequences of their systems, and demonstrating that they are concerned about these issues has become important, both publicly and institutionally.

None of this means that their concerns are necessarily insincere. They might genuinely believe that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is becoming a realistic possibility within the next few years, and that certainly raises important questions worth taking seriously.

Still, I would distinguish between a growing demand for philosophical thinking and an actual demand for philosophers in the job market. Those are two very different things. The former might be increasing considerably, while the latter remains much more restricted, specialized, and often absorbed into positions with entirely different titles.

Perhaps the real opportunity for philosophers in the age of AI is not to become philosophers working in tech, but to recognize that some of the most pressing problems in technology have always been philosophical problems — even when nobody in the industry called them that.