Philosophy (thus, with a capital letter) promises to broaden our horizons, expand minds and illuminate the deepest recesses of the human condition, but there is something that always it has cost him a lot promise: employment. Before the pandemic the INE published unemployment rates of the main university degrees in Spain and it turned out that in Philosophy it was around 18.4%. It is not the worst data, but it is well above average. Ironies of life, now the same technology that threatens to destroy thousands and thousands of positions in other sectors is revaluing the figure of philosophers.
Of course, we are talking about the AI.
AI seeks philosopher. a month ago Henry Shevlinresearcher at the University of Cambridge, shared with his followers curious news on LinkedIn: his signing by one of the leading organizations in the field of AI, Google DeepMind. So far nothing surprising. An academic signing for a company that already employs thousands of people.
The curious thing is that Shevlin is a philosopher and in his post he emphasizes that he joins the DeepMind staff as such. “Yes, royal title”, insist before specifying that he will be in charge of working in the field of artificial consciousness, artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the relationship between humans and AI.
Is it a unique case? Not at all. And that’s the most interesting thing about it. The development of AI and the extensive (very extensive) list of challenges that accompanies it has made companies in the sector look with growing interest at a very specific profile: that of philosophers capable of helping them train their algorithms, anticipate the ethical and legal challenges (and risks) that may arise in the future and, in general, advance on a path so complex that it will require interdisciplinary teams. It no longer comes with technical profiles.
At least 10… and counting. Recently Wired explored how the AI industry is recruiting philosophers and collected an interesting piece of information. It is almost anecdotal and far from offering a global image of the sector, but it is still illustrative: according to its estimates, Google DeepMind already has at least 10 philosophers and Anthropic has four.
These are not large figures, but in light of advertisements like Shevlin’s, the bet that universities they are doing for the interconnection between AI and philosophy and the growing interest of Silicon Valley by ethics experts, it is not unreasonable to think that both paths (artificial intelligence and critical thinking) will become increasingly intertwined.
“There are many more”. That both fields look at each other with interest confirms this Iason Gabrielan ethicist and part of the team of Google DeepMind researchers responsible for analyzing the social impact of AI: “There are now many more philosophers in those areas,” explains to Wired.
For reference, in 2013 only 1% of the jobs on PhilJobs (a leading job platform for philosophy professionals) were related to AI. In 2025 that percentage was already around 16%. Right now your search engine offers 11 vacancies if you do a quick search by entering the terms “artificial intelligence”.
Are there more clues? Yes. Last year, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, revealed that in developing its models the company consulted with “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who have reflected on the ethics of technology and systems.” It may seem like an exaggeration, but the manager himself acknowledged that one of the issues that keeps him up most at night is the ethical drift of the tool.
The focus he did not put it so much in “the big moral decisions” as in the “small decisions” related to the behavior of the chatbots. For example, what questions does ChatGPT answer and what questions does it not? How should you act when the user raises questions related to suicide?
How to act in “delicate situations” and make the tool useful in them? How, if you take into account that as ChatGPT becomes popular, it faces users with increasingly disparate perspectives and approaches? These are not just theoretical questions. In 2025 a couple from California sued OpenAI when considering that his chatbot had encouraged his 16-year-old son to take his own life.
What can a philosopher contribute? Silicon Valley’s interest in philosophers It’s not exactly newbut it is equally true that AI has reinforced its attractiveness. “This is probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great,” ironizes the philosopher Henry Ajder. It’s not surprising at all. Thinkers like him have been exploring key questions in the development, training and future of AI for years.
Can there be an artificial consciousness? And one superintelligence associated with AI? If so, how to address it? Can we talk about ethics in AI? Is it enough for a machine to behave as if it understood or felt to be attributed intelligence? What if it is used for immoral purposes, such as undermining democracies, disinformation, or creating weapons?
Is it always appropriate for AI to imitate human behavior? How to respond to “delicate situations” like the one Altman proposed? And the algorithmic biases that affect issues as delicate as diversity or equality?
Influencing each other. As the philosopher Manu Collado pointed out in April an article of The Vanguard in which he analyzes the signing of Shevlin, Google hopes that the expert will provide “philosophical rigor when creating conceptual frameworks, clarifying terms such as consciousness, agency and intention and, perhaps most pragmatically in a business sense, anticipating ethical and regulatory dilemmas so that the company is prepared.”
In short, achieve best chatbots and go one step ahead in the dilemmas and challenges that the development of AI may generate in the future.
“Reason more ethically”. A philosopher expert in logic and metaphysics recently confessed to Atlantic that a company wanted to hire him as a consultant precisely to “train large language models so that they reason more rigorously about ethics.”
The truth is that at this crossroads it is not only philosophers who influence technology. The latter is also leaving a mark in the training of university students, with new academic programs on AI ethics or ontology applied to technology.
Between epic and marketing. Not everything is an advantage or a selfless effort to achieve chatbots increasingly better and more competent in the face of the ethical dilemmas that we pose to them. Wired alert of the risk that companies like DeepMind or Anthropic end up using philosopher signing announcements as advertising, as part of an effort to improve their image.
That is, in practice Shevlin’s work does not influence the company’s corporate decisions and is reduced to simple ‘ammunition’ for the corporate marketing departments. Time will tell.
Images | Igor Omilaev (Unsplash), Quilia (Unsplash) and Sam (Unsplash)
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