[em500]

This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.

> While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

But wait, there's this:

> Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

So, between 6 and 12 each?

[gregates]

What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.

[cwillu]

Wouldn't the correct comparison would be filled positions tenure and tenure-track positions?

[gregates]

The implicit assumption is that these AI-company jobs were recently created and indicate the start of a trend.

Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)

He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.

[taeric]

Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!

[Pamar]

Half-dozens of them, apparently.

[vitorfblima]

more than half a dozen, probably, so safe to say there could be as much as ten.

[zombot]

Can earth's population fill that demand?

[throwaway27448]

> each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol

[jambalaya8]

Imagine explaining Nietzsche's relationship with his sister to an AI. :/

[fellowniusmonk]

The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.

[Izkata]

Hey now, that might be infinite% growth compared to just a couple of years ago!

[consensus1]

Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.

[c7b]

Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...

[chasd00]

> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats

when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.

[keiferski]

Still an “architect” though.

[jambalaya8]

Was thinking about this the other day, though it seems they would need to be fairly shortsighted not to realise this before they chose it as a profession. Never the less, it is a stable income (til AI takes over the bulk of designing all of those franchise locations, anyway, or whatever). People respect the career.

Imagine not reading up on it after reading Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", and deciding to major in architecture in college. I would have felt brutally misled.

Computer game programming probably felt like that to a lot of people in the 80s and 90s.

Honestly, can't think of many fields that would not feel disappointingly limited and too competitive for 'the good projects' now. :(

[6510]

Someone did quote me on bash.org once as having said: Wanting a man who doesn't smell is like wanting a woman who doesn't talk.

[glaring]

Reminds me of section 211 in Beyond Good and Evil (and all of part 6, for that matter)

[gregates]

The title of the article is misleading -- they're pretty clearly talking about philosophy PhDs here.

[consensus1]

By my personal standards for the term, the majority of philosophers don't have PhDs and the vast majority of philosophy PhDs are not philosophers.

[kazinator]

Those are dining philosophers!

[dlcarrier]

That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Well yeah rightwing people are not the kind of people to take up psychology. I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .

[dlcarrier]

Romney was even pretty centrist, to the point that Obamacare was based on Romney's plan. A similar analogy would be if only a half dozen employees in some field were willing to vote for Fetterman.

[UncleOxidant]

At this point I wouldn't consider Romney "rightwing", more of a centrist by current standards. Heck, the president probably thinks Romney is a socialist.

[onraglanroad]

I suppose that makes sense if you assume that people who aren't right wing must be Marxist.

I'm neither and am labelled left wing because I think everyone deserves some basic level of life and dignity.

[throwaway27448]

> I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .

I imagine you'd find more than average, actually. You have a front-row seat to how the sausage is made.

[alfiedotwtf]

> a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes…

The irony

[why_at]

There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662452

[mrhottakes]

> This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.

That's the in-house style for the WSJ

[beastman82]

Not sure if it changed but this is written by NYTimes.

FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.

[talon8635]

Agree 100%