51–60 of 292 posts
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If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
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Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
So? Almost all professions have jargon known only to themselves. You think most people have any clue what a garbage collector is?
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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 there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman it is a way of thinking
Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.
Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
"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"... There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide , vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
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The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.
Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.
> “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. According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
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If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
If you meant doing a service job at a small business, where you can have real ownership over how it treats its customers, I would agree with you.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, 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.
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.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... 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.
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.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.