Warning: philosophers at work

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I’ve bumped into a couple of conversations about philosophy this week. The first was in the Economist, in an article which claimed that philosophy graduates may have a better chance of getting hired then computer science graduates, especially by AI companies. It’s not clear whether those philosophy graduates are expected to teach the models, coach the executives, or advise the developers, but it’s nice that they have jobs.

On the face of it, I should feel positive about this development. For the last ten years, since AI (in its pre-generative, pre-transformer incarnation) started to be used in the companies I was working for, especially in data-rich decision making use cases, such as fraud and financial crime detection and customer needs analysis, I have believed that AI ethics was an urgent problem.

As I have an academic background in philosophy and a professional background in software engineering, I was worried that a) the people I trusted least to build sophisticated moral reasoning into their designs were software engineers, and b) the people that I trusted least to explain moral reasoning to business executives and solution builders were philosophers. This may sound unfair to both groups, but, as a member of both, I felt able to say that: a) software engineers are relentless optimisers, and relentless optimisation is not the best path to ethical choices; and b) philosophers struggle to explain concepts in ways that influence the practical choices of people such as software engineers.

Like all philosophical assertions, there are plenty of people who would disagree. (This is one of the risks of letting philosophers into boardrooms and governance forums: even when they are confident in their positions, they feel obliged to point out that other people would take different positions.) Some would advocate a form of philosophy, known as utilitarianism or consequentialism, which very roughly says that the right thing to do is that which secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This way of thinking seems compatible with relentless optimisation and is, unsurprisingly, quite popular in Silicon Valley.

I could make long arguments against this way of thinking, and in favour of my preferred school of thought, virtue ethics, which is focused on character and what it means to live a flourishing life and which, I believe, is more humble about the role of philosophy in making day to day moral choices,

However, rather than explore that argument here (it would take rather more words than I can fit in one article), I think it’s better to think about the other encounter I had with philosophy this week. This was when the philosophy professor David Kyle Johnson appeared on the always-great Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast. Johnson was there to discuss the concept of scientific skepticism, what it means for theories to be falsifiable, and whether theories that include supernatural phenomena are subject to scientific evaluation.

This led to a fascinating and lively discussion, but I was particularly interested in something that Johnson said earlier in the podcast. He said that he regularly met students who first encountered philosophy as part of their introductory University courses, and were delighted and surprised to find that it offered them a new way of thinking about the world.

This is very similar to my own experience. I left school after A-levels and went straight to work rather than to University. I didn’t study at undergraduate level until a few years later, through the Open University, and did the Arts Foundation course, which included a philosophy component. Like Johnson’s students, I was gripped by this way of approaching the world, applying structure and reason to problems which otherwise seemed intractable. I went on to take every OU undergraduate philosophy course on offer, and to go on to do a PhD in ethics.

I remember one of my tutors describing studying philosophy, especially moral philosophy, as both a gift and a curse. It’s a gift because it teaches you a way of approaching important questions in a structured way, and I think this brings more meaning to life. It’s a curse because it sometimes reveals that the world has weaker foundations than you thought it had, and you have to figure out how to live in it anyway. (David Hume famously expresses both these sides of philosophy in his Enquiry Concerning Human Nature, when his scepticism leads him to, ‘fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty’, but he finds a remedy in ordinary human life: ‘I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther’.)

There are a few ways in which technology companies hiring philosophers could put them to work. They could enlist them in the cast of responsible AI theatre, alongside the legal, risk and compliance teams, and ask for reassurance that the thing that they wanted to do all along was the right thing to do. They could invite them to somehow bolt in or inject ethical reasoning into their AI solutions, boiling millennia of complex human thought and unresolved questions down to a prompt or a set of guardrails. They could require them to deliver answers to questions about morality and knowledge with the same precision and certainty as answers to questions about engineering.

Or they could invite them to instigate that surprise and fascination that I and David Kyle Johnson’s students found when encountering philosophy for the first time. They could let the discipline of structured reasoning about complex, value-laden problems into their organisations, and live with the uncertain and disconcerting results that produces. They could accept that, while their philosophers will doubtless have opinions and argue for answers, their job is to understand, evaluate and respond to those opinions and arguments: it is to make their reasons their own.

I hope that they opt for the latter.

(Views in this article are my own.)