00:00For years, philosophy graduates have been the butt of jokes about unemployable degrees,
00:04said Business Insider. Now, they're being offered six-figure salaries by the world's
00:08most powerful AI companies to help shape how machines think and behave. But some suspect
00:13there are ulterior motives at play. High-profile philosophers are already embedded in top AI
00:18firms, such as Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Philosophy is key to safety practices too,
00:24implementing the concept of AI constitutionalism, where legally or morally authoritative texts
00:29are used as scaffolding to direct a system, aims to prevent ominous behavior from the models.
00:34Anthropic revealed earlier this year that the sole doc behind Claude includes sources as diverse as
00:40Immanuel Kant, Apple's Terms of Service, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:45But the relationship between philosophy and tech is not entirely problem-free.
00:49The two have never been quite as entangled nor as fraught as they are now,
00:53said Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. In a fundamental sense, the careful thought of philosophy is at
00:58odds with the frenetic pace of AI. Some experts are concerned that misaligned incentives will
01:03encourage a rush of low-quality work. There is also a degree of suspicion in the world of academia
01:08about philosophers migrating to AI firms, said Wired. The whole AI industry poses significant ethical
01:13risks. These programs could be used to develop new weapons of mass destruction,
01:18undermine democracy, or entrench existing social inequities. And then there's the concern about
01:23ethics washing. Hiring philosophers gives AI companies credibility and signals to the public
01:28that they are outwardly performing a commitment to AI safety.
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