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Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

economist.com

31–40 of 153 posts

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#33
post #20
post #16

I think, therefore I am seeking 2.5m total comp

Time for the regular posts on "how do I transition from senior software engineer to philosopher?"

Buy a lantern and start holding it up to your coworkers’ faces saying you’re looking for a good coder

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#35
It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage.

One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.

https://unifixion.substack.com/p/the-anomalous-ethics-of-pol...

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#37
post #7

For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.

If you're talking about the quote being a giveaway that the article is PR, I'm not following you. The point of the last paragraph is a warning that outsourcing ethical decisions to an AI is likely to result in decisions that one might not actually make and find morally dubious.

And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#40
post #23

Strangely, I found that LLMs responds better to philosophical explanations alongside instructions when writing code than simple imperative tasks of "do this". For example, if you tell a frontier model "This is the feature I'm trying to implement, and this is the problem I intend to solve with it and the reasoning behind it.", you usually get a lot more reliable results that both pass tests as well as function as you…

That sounds like providing context rather than anything philosophical, and it stands to reason that it would lead to better decision making.

The same effect can be observed if you've ever been a software developer where you're told what solution to build without any of the context of the problem you're solving. "We need an FTP server, quick, ops, get on that." leading into "Oh, it turns out the customer didn't need that to receive our emails" leading to a bunch of very puzzled devops.
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