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YuechenLi 12 hours ago [-]
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 intended, even if your spec isn't as detailed overall.
andy99 12 hours ago [-]
That sounds like providing context rather than anything philosophical, and it stands to reason that it would lead to better decision making.
munk-a 11 hours ago [-]
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.
helterskelter 8 hours ago [-]
ENGINEER: (n) Someone who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those with questionable knowledge.
- an offscreen on my new calculator
samrus 10 hours ago [-]
Wouldnt it be nice if leadership just communicated the problem all the way down
dijksterhuis 9 hours ago [-]
it'd be nice if leadership had awareness of the problem to begin with.
npunt 8 hours ago [-]
Funny, I always try to lead with context when handing off product/design work, but I've often experienced devs saying 'please just tell me what to do'. No such issue with AI coding tho, it works great there.
indoordin0saur 11 hours ago [-]
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.
YuechenLi 11 hours ago [-]
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.
the_af 9 hours ago [-]
I think that's a business question rather than philosophical one. It's not the kind of philosophy discussed in TFA.
WarmWash 12 hours ago [-]
There is a strange and bittersweet irony to the first truly impactful AI being more like your extroverted socialite and less like your robo-logical basement geek.
The trope has always been that the AI will be a rigid logician that fumbles and gets confused by human social quirks. Seems instead they love being chatty and playful with words.
samrus 10 hours ago [-]
This is just giving better context right? A human engineer also works better when you explain the problem and why this solution was chosen
mgambati 11 hours ago [-]
That’s context, not philosophy.
skybrian 9 hours ago [-]
I like asking it leading questions. Maybe Socrates was onto something?
gaigalas 11 hours ago [-]
That's interesting, however, what you describe is philosophy in a coloquial framing (non-technical, purpose-driven, etc).
AI companies are hiring academic philosophers, which is something else entirely. It's a discipline that dealt with centuries of socioeconomic changes, deep questions about reality and the self and other important topics that became relevant when humans started interacting with machines.
Scalene2 10 hours ago [-]
AI Lab: Say "I am conscious"
LLM: "I am conscious"
Philosopher (Paid by AI Lab): "It is conscious"
nomel 9 hours ago [-]
Here's a question I personally think is interesting, with the assumption that consciousness is a spectrum (trivially proven by administering neurotoxins to a healthy individual).
Is a squirrel more or less conscious than a dog.
Is a dog more or less conscious than a gorilla.
Is a gorilla more or less conscious than a human?
Is a vision enabled AI model, hooked to a camera feed, more or less conscious than a dog?
MichaelDickens 8 hours ago [-]
They aren't doing anything like that. In fact, they used to specifically train LLMs not to say they're conscious, because users didn't like it. (Maybe they still do that, all I know is they used to.)
AI companies' incentives go the other way. If LLMs are conscious, that means it could be unethical for AI companies to let people use their models in certain ways, which would hurt their profits. It's in their interest to believe that LLMs are definitely not conscious and it's fine to do anything with them.
ks2048 8 hours ago [-]
The philosopher paid by Lab will surely “align” with what is good for Lab, but that might be saying “it’s not conscious (simply all powerful)”.
ares623 9 hours ago [-]
Absolute cinema
outside1234 8 hours ago [-]
The best part is that you just KNOW this is a documentary film too
aperrien 9 hours ago [-]
Prove to me that you are conscious, without referring to the fact that you are a human and have common ground and experiences with other humans.
dozerly 9 hours ago [-]
Poo poo, pee pee
jonplackett 9 hours ago [-]
This is actually a great answer
AndrewKemendo 7 hours ago [-]
Very Diogenes of them
nnnnico 9 hours ago [-]
^ clearly something an LLM would ask
chasd00 9 hours ago [-]
You first
thesmtsolver2 9 hours ago [-]
“Prove X without using the axioms need to prove X.”
why_at 11 hours ago [-]
>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.
ofrzeta 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe it narrows down if you need to bring the right mindset.
scythe 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
epolanski 9 hours ago [-]
Academia is a pyramid like every organization.
Of course you will have less spots as you go up the ladder.
esafak 10 hours ago [-]
It's a ridiculous complaint. They should be overjoyed that companies are hiring academics. It is trivial to fill academic seats with qualified candidates.
hamburgererror 37 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like the same story than when social media companies started to hire psychologists to make their apps more addictive.
Hard_Space 11 hours ago [-]
This is interesting. Until autumn of 2024, when the company was subsumed into a better-heeled AI-VFX concern, I worked for probably the best-known and earliest all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
dbuser99 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dgellow 11 hours ago [-]
They need sociologist of the goal is to mitigate societal impact, not philosophers
personjerry 15 hours ago [-]
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?
gizajob 14 hours ago [-]
Same - philosopher here please hire me. My bachelors thesis was “Wittgensteinian problems for artificial general intelligence.” Three decades working closely with tech and haven’t failed the Turing test yet.
I think SBF and his education from birth (via his mother) in consequentialism should point to the issues made clear when that ethical approach goes wrong or operates from bad, egoistic data, which it’s generally always doing.
applicative 10 hours ago [-]
I agree with the last point, but note that Barbara Fried is a law professor with no philosophical training whatsoever - nevertheless she started writing about the matter and is a published notable of sorts. (This is irrelevant except insofar as the topic was 'trained philosophers')
Moreover, in her book, she claims not to be consequentialist, quite, but had infected her sons:
> Finally, I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, "What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labelling it 'the Repugnant Conclusion'?" Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person-alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us as one.
> This book is for all my boys: Joe, Sam, Gabe, and Matt.
(Needless to say, 'counting everyone as one' doesn't entail consequentialism, nor have most consequentialists had that principle.)
Usually you need to be well-published/cited in the field, so a minor would likely not qualify. People joke around, but philosophers are some of the smartest people I've ever met, and it's not even particularly close. (I graduated ~10 years ago, so most of them are sadly lawyers or in academia these days, though some are engineers or entrepreneurs.)
munk-a 11 hours ago [-]
Genuinely, understanding around philosophy of action has been deeply enriching over my life. To anyone trying to decide on a minor philosophy is always an excellent choice.
skeledrew 10 hours ago [-]
I got a BA in Philosophy, before going on to get a MS in CS. Would not change any of it.
applicative 10 hours ago [-]
What texts and problems are you thinking of under that heading?
asdff 13 hours ago [-]
You need to use everything at your disposal. Wait for the planets to align and the tea leaves to indicate good success. Don't apply until the chicken bones suggest a good time for someone with your constitution. You are going up against a thousand other candidates more or less equally qualified for a highly vague job description and 350k base salary.
slowmovintarget 13 hours ago [-]
Find non-Utilitarian alternative to Effective Altruism by somehow channeling Dostoevsky? Propriety and Reward?
rawgabbit 11 hours ago [-]
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.
simongr3dal 11 hours ago [-]
Getting the feeling that Socrates had a different definition for "powerful" than most.
skeledrew 10 hours ago [-]
Philosophers in general tend to have a different (more profound) definition of things than others do.
elphinstone 12 hours ago [-]
Well that PR is cheaper than buying Johnny Ives for $6 billion. You could probably buy an entire Ivy League philosophy department for 60 million.
AlotOfReading 12 hours ago [-]
The AI price inflation is unreal. Used to be that you could get the grad students doing all the actual work for the price of a pizza party and alcohol.
akitowerns 1 hours ago [-]
Hiring philosophers to patch ethics onto systems built without ethical constraints is like hiring a nutritionist after you've already opened the fast food chain. The architecture decisions were the philosophy.
andy99 11 hours ago [-]
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 philosophers they are seen differently. How much of philosophy is boilerplate vs original thinking and how does it compare to writing software?
samrus 10 hours ago [-]
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
maxaw 11 hours ago [-]
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
ProllyInfamous 10 hours ago [-]
I just read an entire book about consciousness [0], and now I understand myself even less.
My key takeaway was this: I feel, therefore I am; not sure if any more conscious than plants.
skeledrew 10 hours ago [-]
You also communicate with others (not-you). You know that there are others because you can gain knowledge from them, which you didn't have before. And in that knowledge lies awareness of your self and consciousness.
vkou 10 hours ago [-]
Plants also communicate with others and gain knowledge from them.
Is an elm also conscious?
skeledrew 9 hours ago [-]
Can't really make a determination on that as we can't communicate with an elm and have a "heart to heart" talk with it.
jameslk 10 hours ago [-]
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
MichaelDickens 8 hours ago [-]
The trolley problem is probably the most famous thought experiment in ethics, but it doesn't do a good job of distinguishing ethical theories. Both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology agree that it's correct (or at least permissible) to flip the switch. The Kantian argument is that you are not treating the one person merely as a means—you save the five via the second track, and they would still be saved even if the one person wasn't present.
There's a sort of intuitionist deontology that says it is wrong to ever perform an action that causes someone to die, but only 13% of philosophers[1] say you shouldn't switch, compared to 63% who say you should.
I'm sure there are effective altruists on one side of the split and not the other.
bigbuppo 8 hours ago [-]
How much longer until they start hiring the token high school drop out whiz kid, or are they completely skipping that this time around?
12 hours ago [-]
geye1234 13 hours ago [-]
For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.
> [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
felooboolooomba 12 hours ago [-]
>more than half probably come from PR firms
Imagine how bad it is on social media.
Terr_ 5 hours ago [-]
Frankly, I'm kinda scared about a negative-trust future.
Compared to the 90's, not only are the financial pressures for scams/fraud/astroturfing rather extreme, but the cost of running lots of complicated lies is dropping like a stone.
sdellis 12 hours ago [-]
If you're talking about the quote being a giveaway that the article is PR, I'm not following you. The point of the last paragraph is a warning that outsourcing ethical decisions to an AI is likely to result in decisions that one might not actually make and find morally dubious.
And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?
gaiagraphia 6 hours ago [-]
Cool. How many per revenue? And how does it compare?
The so-called economist, is really light on economy.
glimshe 11 hours ago [-]
Some say that much of modern philosophy is simply wordplay with limited actual content... which is exactly what LLMs are great at.
anigbrowl 7 hours ago [-]
There's more to it than wordplay, but it's reasonable to argue that a lot of consists of building castles in the air, ie elaborating a theoretical system in a rigorous and consistent way but where your beginning axioms are kind of arbitrary, or depend on balancing considerations that are fundamentally unmeasurable.
You can turn anything argument inside out by attacking its axiomatic foundation. For example, if I give two people $1000 each as a gift I've favored them both equally, right? But suppose person A is not very materialistic and is completely satisfied with $1000 whereas person B doesn't think it's that much and only feels (say) 10% satisfied; if I know this in advance, wouldn't it have been more just to give person A only $100? But what if person B is just more selfish, or already has so much money that their threshold of satisfaction has escalated in proportion to their wealth? Should I considering the absolute utility of $1000 or the marginal utility to the receiver? And so on.
The problem with hyper-intellectualizing things is that it's like developing an autistic fixation on train schedules and making passionate observations about the 2nd derivative of punctuality metrics, but only on Wednesdays; it's not that the observations are wrong per se, but do they matter?
applicative 10 hours ago [-]
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein - simply wordplay with limited actual content.
giardini 12 hours ago [-]
When they should have hired mathematicians!
__patchbit__ 1 hours ago [-]
I have asked a mathematician to "Define consciousness." who self identifies to be a third of each: poet and linguist, mathematician; the thought bubble offered so far along the mandering trail at resonance to "intrinsic computational consciousness" is a reflection on knowledge and work, randomness in the context of complexity theory.
bharxhav 12 hours ago [-]
It'll be funny when AI will embody human philosophy better than us.
throwitaway222 11 hours ago [-]
Jesus will come back in 2031 and say - oh shit where is everyone?
Humanoid Cylon pops out from the woods: Oh, crap you were really real! We exterminated all the humans a year ago. Well, I guess we did make a mistake.
Someone make an AI video of that.
skeledrew 10 hours ago [-]
I doubt there will be woods to pop out of.
nyeah 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe George Gilder is available. No PhD but lots of hands-on experience.
aniokono 14 hours ago [-]
I think it's in search of AGI (artificial general intelligence).
mohamedkoubaa 12 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they're trying to recruit Yuk Hui
DiscourseFan 11 hours ago [-]
My god if I could be a part of a research team with Yuk Hui...but I don't think a lot of these guys have practical experience.
plastic-enjoyer 9 hours ago [-]
I'd be surprised if Yuk Hui would do this, considering his works and that he is tenured.
9 hours ago [-]
smokel 12 hours ago [-]
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 to find a job more easily. This article seems to make the same kind of mistake.
Also, for all we know these imagined herds of philosophers at AI firms are just labelling pictures of dogs.
gizajob 11 hours ago [-]
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
skeledrew 10 hours ago [-]
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.
TitaRusell 9 hours ago [-]
They just hire philosophers because they are good at talking. They need to sell this shit to normal people, remember?
Nobody is getting paid to search for the meaning of life.
skeledrew 8 hours ago [-]
Philosophers help to guide model training so they exhibit certain values, such as being honest and to avoid causing harm. See the Claude constitution[0] for example.
And they can also help with the bigger questions that become more and more important as models become increasingly capable and human-like in behavior. Like if and how sentient a given model might be[1], and as a result how we are ethically obligated to treat/interact with it.
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.
andy99 9 hours ago [-]
At least in my academic experience, there are academics that are uniquely suited to academia (for better or worse) and there are “academics” that know what to say to be the business version of whatever the discipline is. Neither is necessarily better or worse, but they’re very different and not doing the same thing. Presumably it’s the latter that fit in well with bigco philosophy orgs.
I will say though I went to and taught at lower tier schools, if you’re going to Stanford or whatever it might be so competitive that everyone has already been screened to be the second kind and will do just fine working in industry.
the_af 8 hours ago [-]
Interesting! It makes sense, yes, that there are two kinds of philosophers, one more business-savvy than the other. I still think it's wrong-headed to "buy" philosophy in this way, with a business goal, especially of the Silicon Valley kind (because you don't know the answer, and it might very well be that something makes business sense but is "philosophically unsound"). And in any case, it seems like theater to me.
I do picture a modern Machiavelli advising Altman and Amodei ("it's better for AI to be feared than to be loved, so hype away mio signore!"). Not sure it's a nice image though!
cphoover 13 hours ago [-]
We couldn't possibly be in a bubble.
dvh 13 hours ago [-]
Title said philosophers, not taxi drivers.
rvz 12 hours ago [-]
Regardless of the title, the entire point still stands unchallenged.
> From philosophy? Are you kidding? There's simply no way AI is ever going to come from a bunch of people arguing over what is "qualia" and what is "consciousness
That was funny, and not at anyone else's expense so it doesn't qualify as snark.
dang 6 hours ago [-]
That's a fine distinction about snark which I will have to think about.
The comment itself just joins two clichés. That is too obvious and shallow to be interesting, and you can't be funny without being interesting.
aspenmayer 20 minutes ago [-]
Joining two cliches: $1
Knowing which two cliches to join: $2.49M
llbbdd 11 hours ago [-]
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. :)
dang 10 hours ago [-]
Definitely not singling you out! probably the other comments were posted later, or I didn't see them for some other reason.
gizajob 11 hours ago [-]
Didn’t seem snarky to me. Seemed pointed.
onion2k 12 hours ago [-]
I stopped thinking for myself, therefore I am not.
andy99 12 hours ago [-]
In a world where everyone is using LLMs, the only way to differentiate oneself is to actually think. I don’t know if this is part of the idea behind having some in-house philosophers but it would be interesting. If I was a big lab I’d definitely want some “clean room” humans providing input that’s not just what a model regurgitated.
saltcured 11 hours ago [-]
It's mechanical turks all the way down?
rvz 12 hours ago [-]
Time for the regular posts on "how do I transition from senior software engineer to philosopher?"
lelandfe 12 hours ago [-]
Buy a lantern and start holding it up to your coworkers’ faces saying you’re looking for a good coder
munk-a 11 hours ago [-]
It carries the danger of one of your coworkers responding "What makes a coder good?" and stealing the promotion, though.
Revanche1367 12 hours ago [-]
If you have to ask, then you aren’t any longer.
darth_avocado 12 hours ago [-]
Just look at their HN karma
d_burfoot 12 hours ago [-]
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 from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
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.
sdellis 10 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
anonymous908213 11 hours ago [-]
What are you even talking about? The right to self-determination is literally Article 1 of the UN charter. Nations are governed by power relationships, not philosophical ones, so they ignore the charter, but you aren't proposing anything novel or groundbreaking in any way. It is, in fact, the very first sacred right enshrined in international law, and has been for over 70 years.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.
How to Ask (and answer) Questions the Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- an offscreen on my new calculator
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.
The trope has always been that the AI will be a rigid logician that fumbles and gets confused by human social quirks. Seems instead they love being chatty and playful with words.
AI companies are hiring academic philosophers, which is something else entirely. It's a discipline that dealt with centuries of socioeconomic changes, deep questions about reality and the self and other important topics that became relevant when humans started interacting with machines.
LLM: "I am conscious"
Philosopher (Paid by AI Lab): "It is conscious"
Is a squirrel more or less conscious than a dog.
Is a dog more or less conscious than a gorilla.
Is a gorilla more or less conscious than a human?
Is a vision enabled AI model, hooked to a camera feed, more or less conscious than a dog?
AI companies' incentives go the other way. If LLMs are conscious, that means it could be unethical for AI companies to let people use their models in certain ways, which would hurt their profits. It's in their interest to believe that LLMs are definitely not conscious and it's fine to do anything with them.
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.
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.
Of course you will have less spots as you go up the ladder.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
How do I align myself with such a job?
I think SBF and his education from birth (via his mother) in consequentialism should point to the issues made clear when that ethical approach goes wrong or operates from bad, egoistic data, which it’s generally always doing.
Moreover, in her book, she claims not to be consequentialist, quite, but had infected her sons:
> Finally, I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, "What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labelling it 'the Repugnant Conclusion'?" Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person-alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us as one.
> This book is for all my boys: Joe, Sam, Gabe, and Matt.
(Needless to say, 'counting everyone as one' doesn't entail consequentialism, nor have most consequentialists had that principle.)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Facing_Up_to_Scarcity/Q...
[0] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...>
My key takeaway was this: I feel, therefore I am; not sure if any more conscious than plants.
Is an elm also conscious?
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
There's a sort of intuitionist deontology that says it is wrong to ever perform an action that causes someone to die, but only 13% of philosophers[1] say you shouldn't switch, compared to 63% who say you should.
[1] https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4922
To save a few clicks: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Imagine how bad it is on social media.
Compared to the 90's, not only are the financial pressures for scams/fraud/astroturfing rather extreme, but the cost of running lots of complicated lies is dropping like a stone.
And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?
The so-called economist, is really light on economy.
You can turn anything argument inside out by attacking its axiomatic foundation. For example, if I give two people $1000 each as a gift I've favored them both equally, right? But suppose person A is not very materialistic and is completely satisfied with $1000 whereas person B doesn't think it's that much and only feels (say) 10% satisfied; if I know this in advance, wouldn't it have been more just to give person A only $100? But what if person B is just more selfish, or already has so much money that their threshold of satisfaction has escalated in proportion to their wealth? Should I considering the absolute utility of $1000 or the marginal utility to the receiver? And so on.
The problem with hyper-intellectualizing things is that it's like developing an autistic fixation on train schedules and making passionate observations about the 2nd derivative of punctuality metrics, but only on Wednesdays; it's not that the observations are wrong per se, but do they matter?
Humanoid Cylon pops out from the woods: Oh, crap you were really real! We exterminated all the humans a year ago. Well, I guess we did make a mistake.
Someone make an AI video of that.
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 to find a job more easily. This article seems to make the same kind of mistake.
Also, for all we know these imagined herds of philosophers at AI firms are just labelling pictures of dogs.
Nobody is getting paid to search for the meaning of life.
And they can also help with the bigger questions that become more and more important as models become increasingly capable and human-like in behavior. Like if and how sentient a given model might be[1], and as a result how we are ethically obligated to treat/interact with it.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-c...
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.
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.
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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.
I will say though I went to and taught at lower tier schools, if you’re going to Stanford or whatever it might be so competitive that everyone has already been screened to be the second kind and will do just fine working in industry.
I do picture a modern Machiavelli advising Altman and Amodei ("it's better for AI to be feared than to be loved, so hype away mio signore!"). Not sure it's a nice image though!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517186
take that top responder
> From philosophy? Are you kidding? There's simply no way AI is ever going to come from a bunch of people arguing over what is "qualia" and what is "consciousness
The comment itself just joins two clichés. That is too obvious and shallow to be interesting, and you can't be funny without being interesting.
Knowing which two cliches to join: $2.49M
EDIT: Upon finishing reading the other comments on this article though...I feel a bit singled out. :)
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 from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
https://unifixion.substack.com/p/the-anomalous-ethics-of-pol...
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.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.