This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.<p>> 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.”<p>But wait, there's this:<p>> 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.<p>So, between 6 and 12 each?
> each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.<p>Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol
What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.
Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!
That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.
The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.
Hey now, that might be infinite% growth compared to just a couple of years ago!
Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.
Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats<p>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.
Reminds me of section 211 in <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i> (and all of part 6, for that matter)
> a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes…<p>The irony
> This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.<p>That's the in-house style for the WSJ
I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program.<p>I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil.<p>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.<p>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.
"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject."<p>Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be.<p>Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology.<p>I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.<p>Not sure I’d recommend doing <i>only</i> 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 graduated a long time ago with a degrees in CS and philosophy.<p>I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
Well sure if you want to actually be right. If you just care about looking right rhetoric might be a better fit.
CS degree? Employable?
I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions.<p>I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.<p>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.<p>It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.<p>>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments<p>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 think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.<p>I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.<p>Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
But then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.
And I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite!<p>Now I program to be less stochastic<p>:)<p>(Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
Aha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals.<p>However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
Much of the apparent obscurantism in continental philosophy is a product frankly of bad translations.<p>That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.<p>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.<p>Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
It is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
Dont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi
Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
> whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.<p>Well, at least until recently.
There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few
In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.
Sure, but is there any evidence that psychology and for that matter, any animal intelligence, is anything more than linear algebra?
To be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.
Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.
The reality is it would be a very small % of philosophy majors or the philosophically interested who would be able to shape their approach or personal opinions to match what the AI labs are looking for anyways.<p>Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.<p>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.
>> 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.<p>Anecdotal evidence to support your point.<p>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.<p>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.
The strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.
"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"...<p>There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs <i>worldwide</i>, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.
Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.
If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
Ok, you got me. It took me a minute.
and famously doesn't require a degree
If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?
knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher<p>there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman<p>it is a way of thinking
Philosopher vs MBA. Everyone dogs on MBAs.<p>Philosophy can have strong mid career earnings especially if you go into law. Or get lucky like Reid did.
> knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher<p>Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.
That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.
I'm not seeing any evidence of this. Precision tools raise the ceiling. AI mostly just raises the floor. Ease of use is a focus point for all AI labs and it's what they're constantly trying to improve. Yes, an expert can juice these models for all they've got, but an average Joe today is probably getting better results than the best power users had a year ago. Extrapolate this a bit and ask yourself if businesses will ever want to pay your geniuses and craftspeople a professional's wage if they could get 'good enough' results from any desperate minimum wage worker, or even by doing the work themselves.
It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …<p>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.
Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.<p>While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!<p>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.
You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?<p>At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious<p>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
This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.<p>Speech Act Theory, Austin's <i>How to Do Things with Words</i>, 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.<p>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.<p>I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: <a href="https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-history/" rel="nofollow">https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi...</a>. 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.<p>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.<p>Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.<p>Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you <i>mean</i>?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)
> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.<p>The mark of a true philosopher.
David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors.<p>Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying.
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...</a>
<a href="https://archive.ph/7A8cW" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/7A8cW</a>
When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
But a law degree is probably even better. I know what you mean though, consulting companies also hire the (top 1-3%) philosophy majors and math/physics majors for the same reason. Good thought processes.
Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
Arguments so watertight that none of them ever agree with each other and have argued for thousands of years without a resolution to even the most basic of questions.
Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
Philosophy undergrad here and yeah I’d say law school was the typical next step. A few medical school as well.
They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge
I got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now<p>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 much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.
You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.
Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.
When I was a young man I took three philosophy courses from a very old man who, when he was a young man, was the dissertation director of Alan Turing. The latter, by the way, was an habitué of the seminar of Wittgenstein.
I studied it getting my CS degree - you can literally write mathematical formulas using symbols and you can perform operations in logic. Very different from a philosophy class - excuse me if you were already aware.
"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."<p>I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.<p>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 find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.<p>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.
the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter
When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.<p>According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. 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.”<p>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?
It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design
It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.v1A.sRD0.97_nQ2W3e43o&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...</a>
<a href="https://archive.ph/7A8cW" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/7A8cW</a>
It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.<p>That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?
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