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Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

economist.com

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Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#51

Post by rawgabbit »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #11
personjerry wrote: post #2

Hmm I spent a good amount of time in big tech, now work in AI, and I minored in philosophy at Berkeley back in the day (Parmenides, Socrates, Plato etc.) How do I align myself with such a job?

Find non-Utilitarian alternative to Effective Altruism by somehow channeling Dostoevsky? Propriety and Reward?

Socrates argued if you believe something is evil and powerful people do evil then by definition they are not "powerful" -- they are just "evil". As a corollary, if you believe something is good and the people who do good happen to be the weakest members of society, by definition, they are "powerful" -- it is society that is messed up.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#52

Post by saltcured »

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…

Not sure I buy this. In my mind, dissolving this state relationship would be renouncing your citizenship as an individual.

Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.

Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#53

Post by the_af »

What strikes me as funny is this notion of hiring academic philosophers to work in the machinery of startups and businesses, "money (and coffee, presumably) in, philosophy out".

The kind of "philosophy" the article mentions is school-level and common knowledge, hopefully they don't need to hire anyone to learn about e.g. the Socratic method (their own LLMs will happily regurgitate it). Are they truly hoping to "buy philosophy" or have scholars "do philosophy" for their AI systems? Do these entrepreneurs even understand what philosophy is? I guess Silicon Valley really is doomed to rediscover (and misunderstand) the wheel again and again.

In any case, if I were a philosopher, I wouldn't count on this. This kind of jobs are very likely to fall prey to layoffs, and even worse if their "philosophizing" produces conclusions their employers don't like. I still remember when one of the FAANG (Google?) fired their head of AI ethics because they didn't like what she was saying. I think she may have been a bit abrasive, but really, philosophy isn't a product and if they are going to corral how philosophers think or communicate, it's not going to work.

---

Edit: from TFA:

> TEN YEARS ago, as the AI revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice

More like made-up advice. Never heard of it. It's true it was often said (way before 10 years ago) that it was hard to find employment in the humanities, but really, who adviced them to "learn to code"? The (dumb) learn to code movement was not targeted specifically at them. Sometimes it seems to me articles get written in bizarro world.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#54

Post by indoordin0saur »

andy99 wrote: post #23
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…

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

Yeah lol. That definitely does not sound like philosophy. Giving a "why" you want to implement a feature and make particular changes will help the AI stay on track much better than if it is driving blind. It can't make choices without understanding what the desired outcome is.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#56

Post by win311fwg »

munk-a wrote: post #40
andy99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#57

Post by maxaw »

Given the the labs are trying to create [super] human-like consciousness, partly through the guidance of huge system prompts, and many philosophers are experts in textual descriptions of consciousness it makes sense

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#58

Post by dgellow »

dbuser99 wrote: post #30

I suppose they should. That seems like the right, or at least a related, discipline for some of the questions raised by ai developments. But i cannot help but feel completely unenthusiastic about the idea of the AI labs controlling the narrative around societal impact of AI.

They need sociologist of the goal is to mitigate societal impact, not philosophers

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#59

Post by llbbdd »

dang wrote: post #50
llbbdd wrote: post #16

I think, therefore I am seeking 2.5m total comp

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. :)

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#60

Post by YuechenLi »

andy99 wrote: post #23
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…

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

I would say it is definitely a form of context, but when people think of LLM context windows in terms of coding is more technical context related: "what has been done before, what's the coding task at hand." etc.

However, I think that there is a philosophical portion to that context as well: "What problem is this feature supposed to help with? How would you verify that passing unit tests means that the code is working as intended? Does this feature need to exist at all?" LLMs usually need these to be provided to them explicitly since they are not good at inferring the correct intent compared to humans, otherwise they just make something that looks right but doesn't work right.

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