Federal Reserve report: Philosophy students more wanted than computer scientists by AI companies

A report by the Federal Reserve shows that American philosophy students have a better chance of getting a job than their peers who studied computer science. Several of them are recruited by AI companies even before they graduate, according to Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at Yale University, writes The Economist.

Philosophy and AI expert Jörg Noller at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich also sees an interest in philosophers at the big AI companies such as Anthropic and Open AI.

- I think that more and more companies in the future will need philosophers who work with them, especially when it comes to concepts like intelligence, says Noller.

"Make them better at reasoning"

Why are philosophers in particular sought after? According to Åsa Wikforss, professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University, it is, among other things, about training the AI ​​models to make them better at reasoning and not drawing hasty conclusions or hallucinating.

- To give them epistemic humility, that is to say that you are humble in the face of the fact that you can be wrong, and therefore ask a few more questions and check a little better and avoid wrong conclusions of various kinds, says Åsa Wikforss.

Daniel Greco, philosophy professor at Yale, has himself worked on training AI models.

- There are a few of us in the philosophy faculty who have worked on the side with AI reinforcement learning with human feedback, but I don't think it's a full-time job for many, he says.

- The work was very much about making them better at reasoning philosophically rather than making them more ethical.

"Way for them to say we care"

Even Karim Jebari, a researcher at the Institute for Future Studies, sees a certain increase in the number of philosophers in the AI industry, but perceives that the work involves a lot of writing different types of value-based plans and discussing AI ethics.

- This is a way for them to say: we care, we take ethics very seriously, says Jebari.

- I think it is an essential role for the philosophers to wash the reputation of these companies which are becoming increasingly unpopular.