philosophers Archives

The new star signing of AI is neither an engineer nor a data scientist, but he masters stoicism: the philosophers

July 3, 2026 by usatoday24

A little less than a decade ago, studying philosophy implied a question: “And what are you going to live on?” Like many other races in the Humanities branchthe philosophy registered a low job insertion rate. According to published data in 2023 by EuropaPress, The unemployment rate for Philosophy graduates was 20 times higher than that of Electronic Engineering graduates. However, in the midst of the rise of AI, the companies that are training and evolving it have realized something: they do not need engineers to program, what they need is to hire philosophers who define how a model should think and how an AI that talks to millions of people every day should behave. Demand has reached a level where their salaries rival those of any senior engineer. From Socrates to defining AI. Studying philosophy was a risky bet due to its few professional opportunities (mainly teaching) and precarious salaries. But something has changed in the sector that was least expected: that of cutting-edge technology that was developing the AGI. According to collected In an article published in AtlanticIn 2013, only 1% of the offers published on PhilJobs, the academic job portal, mentioned artificial intelligence in the description of their offers. In 2025, that figure It was already close to 16%. And a good part of those positions were junior positions. That is, they join technology companies even with profiles with little experience. Why an AI company needs a philosopher. The reason for this change is that companies have made AI capable of processing data emulating the operation of a human neural network, but its interactions are with humansso their responses and decisions must be in tune with the ethical and moral values of humanity. Philosophers have been studying precisely that for centuries. Anthropic is perhaps the clearest case. Your philosopher Amanda Askell He leads the team that shapes the character of the model, and in January 2026 he published what the company itself calls the Claude constitutiona document of more than twenty thousand words that establishes the values that the system must follow. As the company itself explains, this text is used directly in the training of the model. Askell counted to the magazine time that his way of approaching this work is as if he were dealing with a highly gifted child: “you have to be honest, because a smart child immediately detects when someone is lying to him.” Google opened the season to sign thinkers. Anthropic is not the only one that has incorporated philosophers into its staff. Google DeepMind took a similar step in April 2026. As and how I collected the university newspaper Varsitythe company announced the incorporation of Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of mind from the University of Cambridge, for a position that the company itself baptized, literally, as “Philosopher.” His work at DeepMind was to focus on issues of artificial consciousness, human-AI relations, and preparation for AGI. OpenAI has also taken note. OpenAI has followed a similar path, although less transparent in the details. Sam Altman has come to affirm that ChatGPT’s current responses “are the result of a consultation with ‘hundreds of experts’”, specifying that they were philosophers who have reflected on the ethics of technology and systems. In fact, even universities have jumped on the bandwagon and the American Philosophical Association (APA) has been delivering since 2024 two annual awards of 10,000 dollars for philosophical investigations on AI. Profession of the future, but a future that is too fast. Not everything is good news for the union. Daniel Fogal, professor of bioethics at New York University, told The Atlantic that this boom has a real distorting effect on the discipline. According to Fogal, there are philosophers who deep down do not want to dedicate themselves to AI, but feel that they have no choice if they want to enter the job market. The risk, he warns, is that a lot of mediocre work is published just to fit into a passing fad. Good philosophy takes time, Fogal summarizes, and rarely emerges as a direct response to the market. AI companies, on the other hand, launch new models every few months. The philosopher may be the star signing of the sector, but he will continue to be the person least comfortable with the rush. And perhaps for that very reason it is the one that is most needed in this development. In Xataka | We thought that leaving university and starting to work “on your own” was impossible: the key is knowing what to study Image | Unsplash (Sarah Sheedy)

Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have never had it easy to do their thing. Until AI arrived

June 11, 2026 by usatoday24

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 … Read more

We have been reading philosophers from the West and Asia for centuries in search of the secret of happiness. Turns out the Aztecs had it

February 25, 2026 by usatoday24

Each course Lynn Sebastian Purcell, philosophy professor, repeat the same experiment. After reviewing the passage from the ‘Odyssey’ in which Ulysses renounces an eternal life of pleasures with the nymph Calypso to search for his wife and son, the teacher presents a dilemma to his students: How many would do the same as the king of Ithaca? “How many of you would reject immortality and a pleasant existence on the condition that you never see your family and loved ones again?” defiant spear Purcell to the classroom. The answer is always the same: nobody. The ‘Odyssey’ is an epic poem that connects with the Greco-Latin tradition, but in reality that particular passage about Ulysses summarizes well the vital philosophy of a civilization that lived thousands of kilometers from the Ionian Sea: the aztec. Goal: happiness. I don’t know exactly who you are, but it’s quite likely that you, me and the more than 8 billion Of people who share this world, we agree that it is desirable to have a happy life. Logical, right? Happiness is one of those golden nuggets that philosophy has been searching for for centuries. I did it in times of Epicurus and he does it in our days. In fact one of the most famous treatises of Bertrand Russella famous philosopher of the 20th century, is titled with a phrase that is quite a proclamation: “The conquest of happiness”. The lesson of Ulysses. However, it is one thing to aspire to happiness and another to decide how to achieve it or even what exactly happiness is. This is where the passage from the ‘Odyssey’ of the nymph Calypso. If it’s just about seeking happiness, Ulysses already had it, right? If we agree that the goal is to be happy (just like that), isn’t it a good idea to spend an eternal life, free of illness and deprivation, living with a goddess on a distant paradise island? Why does Ulysses decide to return to the sea… and his hardships? “Let it be worth it”. Ulysses’ attitude (like that of Purcell’s students) connects fully with a philosophical ethic that for decades has gone unnoticed in the West: that of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. For them, remember the teacherwhat humanity really seeks is not so much a life full of happiness and pleasures as “an existence that is worthwhile.” That’s the goal. The texts that are preserved and tell us about how the Aztecs saw the world show that for them humanity faced “an existential problem,” In Purcell’s words: a brief, fickle existence, during which it is impossible to control everything just as it is not to skate in a quagmire. “Slippery is the land”. “What they wanted to say is that, despite our best intentions, our life is prone to error, failure in our objectives and, therefore, to ‘fall’, as if we were going to end up in the mud. Furthermore, this earth is a place where joy comes mixed with pain and setbacks,” explains the professor in an article published by the Philosophy Association (APA). In it he remembers that this entire conception of the world can be summarized in a popular saying: “Slippery, slick is the earth”“slippery, slippery is the earth.” Wait, Aztec philosophy? Exact. It has not been easy to survive and in the West we may not have paid enough attention to it, but that does not mean that the pre-Columbian Aztecs created a valuable philosophical corpus, with different currents and treatises. “We have many volumes of his texts recorded in his native language, Nahuatl,” claims Purcell at the BBC. “While few of the pre-colonial hieroglyphic-type books survived the Spanish burnings, our main sources of knowledge derive from the records made by Catholic priests until the early 17th century.” A different vision. Thanks to them we preserve codices with sayings, exhortations, poems, dialogues… different manifestations that essentially tell us about the same thing: how the Aztecs who lived between the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th approached existence. Good example is the ‘Florentine Codex’a bilingual work by friar Bernardino de Sahagún on pre-Columbian knowledge. His legacy is not only interesting because of what he tells us, it is also interesting, Purcell claimsbecause it opens our eyes to “another pre-modern culture with an ethics of virtues”, one different from the legacy of Aristotle or even Confucius. “Place of joy with fatigue”. At this point the question is obvious… If the Aztecs believed that what humans really want are lives “worthwhile”, even more than joyful and pleasant existences, how to achieve it? How to face the passage through this world, “a place of joy with fatigue and pain”, as an Aztec passage says? The key is in a recipe with four ingredients, four “levels” that allow us to enjoy a rooted life, “neltiliztli”. Continuing with the metaphor of existence as a swampy terrain, full of mud, the idea is to take root to gain a foothold. And how to achieve it? To begin by ‘rooting’ in one’s own body. As Purcell explains, the figurines and descriptions we preserve of the Aztecs show us that they liked to exercise their bodies. In fact, they had a regimen of activities aimed at stretching and strengthening the body that is partly reminiscent of yoga. Rooted in the body, it had to be done at another level: the “psyche”, seeking a balance between the heart and the head, desires and judgment. “Only in the middle can you go, only in the middle can you live”, advises one of his works. Social creatures… and of the earth. In an article Published years ago in Aeon, the scholar of Latin American philosophy points out two more levels at which those who want to achieve a rooted life must work, “neltiliztli”, a term that is also used as “truth” and “goodness.” The first level is “rootedness in the community.” We live surrounded by people, in societies in which we play a role that connects us with others and activates the … Read more

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