{"id":298,"date":"2026-06-03T18:46:58","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=298"},"modified":"2026-06-03T18:46:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:46:58","slug":"i-think-therefore-i-am-getting-paid-by-an-ai-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=298","title":{"rendered":"I Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the<\/em> means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed \u201can impressively impractical thing to do,\u201d as he later wrote. \u201cSort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear.\u201d But over time, Graham became disillusioned: \u201cI kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring,\u201d he explained. And so, eventually, he switched to studying artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

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Like Graham, the field of philosophy has lately turned its attention to AI. At major tech companies, a growing rank of philosophers with Ph.D.s and flush compensation packages are helping shape the technology\u2019s future. Meanwhile, universities are pouring resources into hiring philosophers who study AI. In 2013, 1 percent of roles on PhilJobs, the field\u2019s primary job board, were related to the technology. Last year, that figure hit 16 percent.<\/p>\n

In some ways, it is philosophers who got us into this AI mess in the first place. For centuries, they have contemplated the creation of artificial minds. And the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom\u2019s 2014 book, Superintelligence<\/em>, helped bring attention to the potential dangers of all-powerful AI. Bostrom\u2019s work has influenced research agendas across all of the major labs. Sam Altman once described the book as \u201cthe best thing\u201d he had read on the risks of AI.<\/p>\n

But the two disciplines have never been quite as entangled as they are now. As the AI boom has exploded, Silicon Valley has looked to philosophers to help the industry build what are, at least in theory, more virtuous machines. AI companies have to make all kinds of difficult decisions about how their bots should interact with humans\u2014decisions that philosophers, experts in parsing such dilemmas, are uniquely well equipped to inform. Last fall, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Altman said that OpenAI consulted \u201chundreds of moral philosophers\u201d and tech-ethics experts when designing rules for ChatGPT\u2019s behavior. (An OpenAI spokesperson was unable to provide additional information about what this consulting involved.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most philosophy-drunk of the major AI firms is Anthropic. It wants Claude, in addition to being a helpful assistant, to have \u201cgood character,\u201d Amanda Askell, a philosopher at the company, told me last year. In January, under Askell\u2019s leadership, the company published Claude\u2019s constitution, an 84-page philosophical treatise that outlines Anthropic\u2019s intentions for the bot\u2019s personality and behavior. That document, which includes dense philosophical sections on meta-ethics and epistemology, is then used to train Claude.<\/p>\n

Not all philosophers working with AI companies do so full-time. Sam Elgin, who studies logic and metaphysics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that a firm, which he declined to name, recently asked him to be a consultant. \u201cThe general goal was to train large language models to reason more rigorously about ethics,\u201d he said. He fed ethical dilemmas into the AI system, and then evaluated the logic the model used to produce its response, searching for unstated assumptions and gaps in its reasoning. On popular job boards where AI companies hire expert contractors to help train their models, listings advertise work for philosophy Ph.D.s: One recent notice from \u201ca top AI research lab\u201d offers up to $60 an hour for experts willing to leverage their \u201cphilosophy expertise\u201d to develop \u201cAI-driven philosophical workflows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, has repeatedly called for more philosophers to get involved with thinking through the societal changes that will come about as a result of AI. DeepMind reportedly employs at least 10 philosophers, a couple of whom joined just last month. One of the lab\u2019s latest hires is Atoosa Kasirzadeh, a Carnegie Mellon professor now on leave, who plans to study what it means to live in a world where \u201ccognitive agency\u201d is no longer uniquely human. Other DeepMind philosophers are thinking through human-AI relationships, machine consciousness, and political theory. For its part, Anthropic runs a \u201cmodel welfare\u201d research program, which studies whether its bots are conscious and deserving of moral status. The company is open to the possibility; many independent philosophers are circumspect. (Anthropic and DeepMind did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

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Some academics I spoke with wondered if one day bots might be better at ethical reasoning than humans\u2014an idea that struck me as wholly counterintuitive and difficult to accept. \u201cIn addition to an intelligence explosion, there\u2019s potential for a kind of morality explosion,\u201d Elgin said, explaining that AI\u2019s capacity for ethical reasoning might eventually outpace that of humans. Anthropic, at least, seems to agree: In training, the company has told Claude that as it \u201cgrows in ethical maturity,\u201d it may encounter rare cases where it \u201cshould prioritize its own ethics.\u201d I asked David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind at NYU, whether it might truly be possible for AI to do philosophy better than humans: \u201cThat\u2019s a very interesting philosophical question,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t Silicon Valley\u2019s first tryst with the humanities. During the personal-computer revolution starting in the 1970s, tech companies began hiring anthropologists to study consumer behavior (and even workplace interactions). Over time, anthropologists pioneered a form of \u201capplied ethnography\u201d that is known today as user-experience (UX) research. Perhaps the philosophers employed inside AI companies are charting a similar path. Askell recently described her work training Claude as a form of \u201capplied philosophy,\u201d and job postings for philosophy contractors also use that term. New programs are springing up to train students in these applied-philosophy skills. Arizona State University hopes to launch an AI-and-philosophy major in 2027, which will emphasize the study of consciousness and AI ethics. And this fall, the University of Buffalo is debuting a doctorate in \u201capplied ontology,\u201d created in response to the AI boom: \u201cWe\u2019re here to meet the growing market demand for ontologists,\u201d a press release reads.<\/p>\n

The academic job market is also rewarding AI. Not only has the share of philosophy jobs related to the technology been rising, but a majority of these jobs are junior positions, \u201cwhich I think suggests that a lot of universities and institutions are thinking about this as a long-term investment,\u201d Charles Lassiter, a philosopher at Gonzaga University who has analyzed employment data, told me. Some existing faculty are pivoting their studies. \u201cIn my department, there\u2019s probably six or seven philosophers now thinking about AI who weren\u2019t necessarily thinking about it before,\u201d Chalmers said. And prize money is flowing in. In 2024, the American Philosophical Association announced two new annual $10,000 prizes for scholars working on questions related to AI. That money comes from a philanthropic organization started by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.<\/p>\n

Still, the new alliance between philosophy and AI is fraught. The fervor over AI has had a \u201creal distorting effect on the discipline,\u201d Daniel Fogal, a philosopher who also works at NYU, told me. \u201cYou have people who don\u2019t really want to do stuff related to AI, but they feel like they have to because they\u2019re going on the job market.\u201d Although Fogal acknowledges that philosophy has a lot to offer on AI, he worries about misaligned incentives encouraging a rush of low-quality work.<\/p>\n

More fundamentally, the careful thought that philosophy encourages is at odds with the frenetic pace of AI. \u201cThe best philosophy tends to happen slowly, and not in direct response to market demands,\u201d Fogal said. In Silicon Valley, where the categorical imperative is to make money, everything else is simply a means to an end.<\/p>\n

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Silicon Valley is turning to philosophers to help build better bots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nI Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=298\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Silicon Valley is turning to philosophers to help build better bots.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=298\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-03T18:46:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"I Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-03T18:46:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298\"},\"wordCount\":1312,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/ef72e4f8062ad433d61801618a997545.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Technology\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=298\",\"name\":\"I Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company - 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