This piece was written in response to a post by Will Brown on X, which read "ambitious college students seeking a future-proof technical education should seriously consider majoring in philosophy."
I began college as an electrical engineering major, but wound up in philosophy, in part, because it was one of the few milieus on campus that embraced questions and thoughts challenging the status quo.
In the engineering department, I would ask a question about why we approached a problem in some way — and a professor would say that’s a “question for the math/physics department” + “we’re engineers, and engineers care about getting the job done.”
Unfortunately, the way the job gets done is universally being rewritten by the technologies about us.
During my engineering internship, I was queried about my habit of scribing and emailing notes after meetings. One full-time staff member felt that, given the details, it must’ve been time-consuming and a misallocation of my time. In reality, I was simply taking notes during the meeting, and prompting the company-provisioned AI to produce dense one-pagers with action items. It took 5 minutes of my time at most.
Today, this is the norm: Granola has taken the market by storm and hit a $1.5 billion valuation off the simple premise that meetings / conversations were previously information sinkholes.
Another reason why philosophy is important has to do with what philosophy really is. One reductive explanation of philosophy is that it is the study of that which is not yet systematized. Mathematics, cognitive science, and psychology were, at some point, within philosophy.
Until these fields earned their scientific groundings, they were thought and debated in academic philosophy. If you’ve ever checked the Wikipedia pages of 1900s scientists and pioneers in any field, you’ll often see them referred to as philosophers. This is so because the inception of any domain is both philosophical & scientific.
At this point, it should now be clear why philosophy is rather resilient to changes in reality-bending periods like this advent of artificial intelligence. The questions that society has asked, and will ask about technology in the coming years have philosophical underpinnings. I’ll share three examples below:
Epistemology asks how we know what we know. Applied epistemology asks how to make practical the theories of knowledge and justification. You may consider Wikipedia, community forums, fact-checking, and community notes to be its derivatives.
Many questions of what is today referred to as AI alignment are questions of applied epistemology: —How do we build truth-seeking machines? —How do we build infrastructure to allow machines to participate in the scientific process? —Can we understand a system we cannot inspect?
Law & Ethics. First, it is likely the case that a new category of law will be created called “AI law” or “Machine law,” just as there is patent law and criminal law. The reason for this is simple: today’s civil infrastructure is designed for a world where humans are the sole and primary actors.
The following questions follow: —Which party is responsible for harm caused by a machine actor? —Can an instrument testify? —When autonomous machine-actors make breakthroughs in science, how is credit assigned?
The history and philosophy of science. This branch of philosophy is self-explanatory and probably the most potent for the time we live through.
Much of the commentary about AI today is ahistorical, whereas the times we live through bear sharp parallels with, say, the development of the atomic bomb OR the development of the calculator. In both these cases, institutions (governments and schools respectively) yelped and reacted in ways that are startlingly similar to what we see today.
Will’s tweet is sharp: I would extend it & add that philosophy is future-proof because it necessarily takes a long-horizon view of matters.
There is a reason why philosophers are increasingly playing leading roles in frontier AI companies and research.
And why tomorrow’s great institutions will be those developing epistemic infrastructure for civilization to learn and know better.