The rise of the artificial intelligence era is changing expectations about careers. While earlier, there were concerns that arts and humanities subjects would be more impacted, the trend appears to have shifted.
According to The Economist, AI companies are actively recruiting philosophers, sometimes even before graduation. This rise in recruitment of philosophers at AI companies is a result of the broader understanding that philosophy offers useful tools for AI development. There is a belief that AI training may be able to benefit from some of the ancient lessons of philosophy.
For instance, the Socratic method, developed in ancient Greece by Plato, encourages structured questioning to test ideas and uncover contradictions. According to The Economist, researcher Jörg Noller argued that this approach can help make AI systems less agreeable and more focused on truth, rather than simply pleasing users.
Another similar idea is that of the “Socratic ignorance.” In Plato's ‘Apology', Socrates says that true wisdom lies in knowing how little one knows. Experts are of the view that building this humility into AI systems could reduce their overconfidence. Iason Gabriel, a senior philosopher at Google DeepMind, an AI lab based in London, attributed an industry-wide decline in hallucinations to such efforts.
Philosophy can also shape how AI systems behave. Thomas Powers of the University of Delaware has argued that if an AI legal assistant is trained on John Locke's writings, it may place strong emphasis on property rights as part of political freedom.
The report added that some developers even allow users to tune such values. For instance, the “Granite” series of models from IBM, an American computing giant, includes settings that let companies adjust outputs to match different corporate philosophies.
At the same time, philosophy can also be helpful in promoting safety in AI tools. To prevent harmful actions like deception or blackmail, some systems are using “AI constitutionalism”, that are based on moral and legal principles. Anthropic has built constitutions for its Claude models using ideas from Immanuel Kant, Apple's terms of service and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There is also a debate about what moral rules should guide AI systems. According to The Economist report, one major approach is deontology, which is linked to Immanuel Kant. This idea says AI should follow strict rules like not lying, not coercing people, and not using people just as tools, even if breaking the rules might produce a “better” outcome. Some AI labs, like Anthropic, include these kinds of rules in their systems.
“These can make AI behaviour more consistent….a plus for deploying robots in homes and public spaces,” Dr Powers told The Economist.
The second ethical approach for AI is “consequentialism,” which focuses on choosing whatever produces the best overall results. This approach is used in systems like ChatGPT and Gemini, the report added.
While AI models may increasingly be tuned to these philosophies in the coming years, critics also worry about “moral deskilling,” where people lose the ability to make ethical decisions if AI makes them for them.
“Morality is historically unstable, culturally variable, strategically manipulable, and often only retrospectively legible,” Roman Yampolskiy, an AI theoretician at the University of Louisville, argued, noting that this makes ethical decision-making difficult to formalise in AI.
