GoKawiil“It’s probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great,” says Henry Ajder, a philosophy postgraduate who advises the UK government and a slew of startups on artificial intelligence. He’s only half joking.
Philosophers have never seemed like the most employable bunch. But AI, the same technology that’s expected to drive many other people out of work, has given new weight to the kinds of questions they’re trained to ask (and sometimes maybe even answer): What is intelligence? What is a mind? “You have philosophers from hundreds of years ago who thought about some of the same problems,” Ajder says. “Now they are becoming material.”
Two of the foremost AI labs have recruited teams of in-house philosophers. “There are significantly more philosophers now—that’s a sound intuition,” says ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads Google DeepMind’s team of research scientists specializing in the societal impact of AI. At Anthropic, resident philosopher Amanda Askell has become one of the company’s most recognizable faces. Both labs declined to disclose the number of philosophers they employ, citing company policy. WIRED counts at least 10 at DeepMind and four at Anthropic.
As philosophers at the labs help to sculpt AI models, producing prominent work cited in hundreds of subsequent research papers, so too is AI shaping the philosophy curricula at eminent universities. Plenty now run AI ethics courses or joint programs in computer science and philosophy. “It’s the kind of flavor of the year,” says Edward Harcourt, professor of philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.
Yet in academia, some regard the philosophers working for the labs with a degree of suspicion. If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making? “It’s quite good for the public perception of the tech companies if people are led to believe they are doing something incredibly unusual and incredibly powerful,” Harcourt says. “There is a self-aggrandizing aspect to encouraging that field of research.”
When Iason Gabriel joined DeepMind nearly 10 years ago, the idea of AI as a moral actor, much less a conscious one, wasn’t really on the horizon. At the time, his focus was on issues like algorithmic bias. But with the advent of large language models in the early 2020s, Gabriel says, “we had an ability to encode a much richer set of values.”
Today, AI agents are beginning to send emails, schedule appointments, and write code—to act in the world. Their behavior stands to affect not only the immediate user but other people too. That’s where Gabriel is focusing his research. “The thing that has now become a very rich area is this question of value alignment—essentially, what it means for the technology to be actively good,” he says. “It turns out that you can sink a lot of philosophical man-hours into trying to understand that.”
There’s a magnetism to questions about consciousness and superintelligence, but philosophers working at the labs spend more of their time on far more immediate risks: around fairness, misinformation, malicious misuse, errant agents, and so on. “There is this interest in AI consciousness now,” says Gabriel. “But there, we’re more in evidence-collection mode.”
Somewhere in the guts of DeepMind’s 180,000-square-foot office in central London, Julia Haas, a member of the company’s responsibility team, asks herself questions like: “What do I really want to understand about the models? What do I think is important? How do we measure for that? How do we frame those problems? How do we communicate them?”