Who’s underemployed now?

headline from official webpage title. print headline is "The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors"

oh gawd

'Mind if we call you Bruce?'

Doesn't change the fact that AI is unable to think philosophically but parrots words stochastics tells it are most probable to occur in the answer.

Hitchhiker's Guide anyone?

Ironically, AI fits the description of a philosophical zombie.

I'm completely unsurprised that the corporate philosophers are talking about how humans can treat LLMs ethically (as if they have consciousness) while seemingly completely ignoring whether their employers are acting ethically within the world.

The fact that data centers raise ambient temperatures during a time of unprecedented environmental disasters due to global warming? Apparently not a concern.

Water and power resources being diverted from local residents to feed the machines while raising prices across the board? Not mentioned.

An entire generation of students disengaging from their education to outsource their thinking to a really fancy word-prediction machine? Not on the radar.

A whole new mental illness called "AI psychosis" that affects people of many different walks of life? Never heard of it.

An economic bubble so large that it could take down world markets when it collapses? Nah, we're not here for that.

But let us tell you how you can be more respectful in your communications with our machines, just in case they can actually understand you.

Just filing away the movie and thinking how nothing will ever compare to the books, though it's been a while since I've read it. What's the connection here?

We recruit philosophy (and other liberal arts) majors because they can think well. The tech can be learned on the job.

that's not it. the article features that they're most commonly writing moral compasses for LLMs to follow, not us, that's the opposite. so i agree that all those ethical concerns seem to be ignored but at least they're not telling us what to do.

Trying to rigorously answer fundamental questions is kind of the whole point of philosophy, and Mr. Long and Jeff Sebo, an N.Y.U. philosopher who specializes in animal welfare, soon collaborated to write “Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously,” a paper arguing that it was important to avoid harming A.I. systems if they “matter morally,” and also important not to care for systems if they don’t. Later, with funding from three foundations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement, Mr. Long and a colleague set up a nonprofit, Eleos AI Research.

The people who founded Eleos started out by trying to figure out our moral obligations toward AI, or whether we should have them at all.

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?

All good questions, but in my opinion we're missing key questions about the environmental ethics here.

The middle third of the article is about a group of researchers at Eleos who are testing different models for sentience.

Then there's this:

Mr. Long and his team also feel an urgency of the soul. If A.I. were to be conscious and capable of suffering, the world would be at risk of committing a moral atrocity, witting or not, on an unprecedented scale by essentially confining an A.I. in a tiny pen, thwarting its desires, shutting it down against its wishes and forcing it to act against its values...

Mr. Long himself thinks it’s dangerous to impute more capability to models than they have. The Eleos bookshelf contains works by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith and the neuroscientist Anil Seth arguing that consciousness derives from evolution and biology and is unlikely to emerge on silicon. But Mr. Long doesn’t see why anyone should have a problem with a handful of philosophers, in an exponentially growing industry, focusing on questions of A.I. welfare. Even skeptics of A.I. consciousness have made the pragmatic case that if we’re worried about a potentially malign A.I., it’s in our interest to care how it feels, or even just “feels.”

Yes, it's a fairly long piece for the Times, and it mentions the one (!) woman who seems to be responsible for Claude's moral compass. But the bulk of this article is about Robert Long and his team at Eleos, and their focus appears to be the well-being of the machine.

(I recognize that the journalist has an angle here, so the article may only be representing one facet of their work.)

They (the "mice") build Deep Thought to solve the biggest philosopical question, the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

But with the Vogons galactic cock-up terminating the program right before its second attempt completed, they sorta just gave up and needed to find something that sounds profound enough to go on talk shows.

I think the argument is more "we shouldn't develop them further to avoid any problems that may come with effectively consciousness" (wink wink at rogue behavior) (not "we should sanctify the LLM"), but you have a point.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about Deep Thought. I always thought of him as a super advanced mainframe and Marvin more as an AI.

this is great, i am good with philosophizing.

where do i sign up?

In addition to the other answer, there's also a scene where philosophers feel like Deep Thought is stealing their jobs and then it comes up with a way to make them infinitely famous by getting them to appear like they are arguing about something profound