A Kantian point*... and a Nietzschean** one:
When Thales of Miletus, arguably the first philosopher, was mocked for his poverty and the uselessness of his trade, he read the skies, foresaw a bumper olive harvest, quietly hired every olive press nearby and made a killing. He thereby proved, Aristotle tells us, that philosophers could easily be rich if they wished, but that this is not what they care about. It has taken some two and a half thousand years, but the market appears finally to have come around to Thales’ point of view.
Panic around A.I. often focuses on whether machines will replace (or simply kill) us. But what the machines are often good at is a distinct set of tasks: Retrieval, near-instant summary and the frictionless, stunning recombination of everything that has already been said. *What they are not good at is what philosophy has been training humans to do for thousands of years: judgment. And so the A.I. companies have started hiring philosophers. They don’t just consult them or wheel them out for an amusing after-dinner talk on the trolley problem; they actually hire them with salaries and, presumably, dental plans. A.I. companies need philosophers because **actually thinking requires forgetting — and knowing when to forget. They need philosophers because of what their machines cannot do.
Judgment is not calculation. It is the capacity to weigh, to discriminate, to sense that one answer is true and another merely correct. It is taste, discernment and the knack of thinking sideways. It is refined only through experience — through error, embarrassment, boredom, grief and the occasional hangover. Meaning is derived from the fact that we are mortal: Things matter to us because we are going to die, and we know it. There can be no meaning in immortality. To borrow from my friend Christian Madsbjerg, I would like to propose a better Turing test than Turing’s: Can a machine experience social anxiety? Can it lie awake at 4 in the morning replaying the stupid thing it said at dinner? Call me when a chatbot does that. To be intelligent in the human sense, the machine would need to give a damn.
Enter the A.I. companies’ philosophers. Anthropic keeps a small squad on the payroll, among them Amanda Askell, whose doctoral thesis was on infinite ethics — the question of how to act well in a universe of infinite value — and whose job is to shape the character of the company’s machine. Google DeepMind has appointed the Cambridge philosopher Henry Shevlin to the newly minted post of “Philosopher,” a job title I have been trying and failing to secure for some 40 years. The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman says his company consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” in drawing up the principles behind ChatGPT. (That’s roughly the turnout of a middling philosophy conference.)
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