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Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

economist.com

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Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#71

Post by jameslk »

I'm highly anticipating the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything

On a more serious note, I found this interesting from TFA:

> The biggest question, though, is what sorts of rules should be put in those constitutions in the first place. Philosophers have zeroed in on two main ethical frameworks. One is deontology. Popular with Kant, among others, this imposes strict rules that prohibit things like lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end, even if it is for a greater good. Anthropic’s constitution incorporates many deontological strictures. These can make AI behaviour more consistent, says Dr Powers—a plus for deploying robots in homes and public spaces.

> The other approach to ethics of interest to philosophers of AI is called consequentialism. It weighs costs against benefits to decide what to do. Models more sympathetic to consequentialism include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Google’s AI models are designed to produce “likely overall benefits [that] substantially outweigh the foreseeable risks”, a classic consequentialist goal.

As a big fan of the trolley problem thought experiment, I am very curious what led to this ethical split between these model makers. I find it darkly humorous and also scary to think about the choices these models could make to influence people and decisions, especially if it's under a utilitarian perspective

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#72

Post by esafak »

why_at wrote: post #62

>Dr Floridi describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a “haemorrhaging”. I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical. This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.

It's a ridiculous complaint. They should be overjoyed that companies are hiring academics. It is trivial to fill academic seats with qualified candidates.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#73

Post by samrus »

YuechenLi wrote: post #19

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…

This is just giving better context right? A human engineer also works better when you explain the problem and why this solution was chosen

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#74

Post by samrus »

win311fwg wrote: post #56
munk-a wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience as a software developer, reverse engineering a stated solution back into the actual problem is almost the whole job.

Wouldnt it be nice if leadership just communicated the problem all the way down

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#75

Post by samrus »

andy99 wrote: post #66

I wonder what it is they feel LLMs can’t do for them and they need a human for? I’d like to see the spec, like are they expecting the philosophers to use Claude all day, maybe in a philosophy harness and will be judged by their token use? Or have they isolated to high value philosophy task that they’ll work on without using AI? I think it would be interesting to contrast with developers and understand how vs philosop…

I think its to identify the capabilities and possibilities (and limitations) for genAI. LLMs can do intellectual grunt work very well, but they dont think, not really, so they cant ideate and design things that havent been built before, like themselves

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#76

Post by dang »

llbbdd wrote: post #59
dang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post snarky one-liners here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

My bad, I meant for this to come off more funny than snarky. Appreciate the check. EDIT: Upon finishing reading the other comments on this article though...I feel a bit singled out. :)

Definitely not singling you out! probably the other comments were posted later, or I didn't see them for some other reason.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#77

Post by scythe »

why_at wrote: post #62

>Dr Floridi describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a “haemorrhaging”. I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical. This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.

>hard to get a real academic position

Tech companies like to rob the cradle, and academic departments hire far more grad students and postdocs than professors. Of course, this is also part of the problem with academic careers.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#78

Post by skeledrew »

smokel wrote: post #28

I don't buy the article's title "Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers". They probably just hire one or two, and hundreds of software engineers. I always found it somewhat annoying that a philosophy study would present itself by stating that graduated philosophers have great job opportunities, implying that studying philosophy would not be a bad choice. It just attracts really smart people, and these tend t…

> graduated philosophers have great job opportunities

I got a BA in Philosophy, and I had 0 impression that it was such. I did it because it's interesting, and as a stepping stone.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#79

Post by skeledrew »

gizajob wrote: post #64
smokel wrote: post #28

I don't buy the article's title "Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers". They probably just hire one or two, and hundreds of software engineers. I always found it somewhat annoying that a philosophy study would present itself by stating that graduated philosophers have great job opportunities, implying that studying philosophy would not be a bad choice. It just attracts really smart people, and these tend t…

When I’ve read about these philosophers it seems often like they’re there to affirm whatever needs to be affirmed, rather than doing the philosopher’s actual role of finding extreme fault in whatever you’re doing and showing how unsound the thinking is and how the task being carried out won’t lead to the results desired etc etc

Philosophy isn't about finding fault. It's about searching for answers. Sure faults may be found, but it's somewhat meaningless without the proposition of - hopefully better - alternatives.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#80

Post by sdellis »

d_burfoot wrote: post #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…

I think that the point of your post, which is that our morals and ethics are often illogical and don't stand up to scrutiny, is getting lost in the debate over your example.
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