The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com161 pointsby benbreen256 comments

Discussion summary

The discussion covers the value of philosophy degrees, AI's impact on jobs, and access to paywalled content. Participants share personal experiences, concerns about automation, and methods to bypass paywalls.

What the discussion says

Philosophy degrees provide valuable teaching and insight.
AI and automation threaten traditional roles in various industries.
Paywalls can sometimes be bypassed using archive links.

“It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program.”
— beepbooptheory

“When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink.”
— cmiles8

Comments

Hacker News

It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.

That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?

by beepbooptheory

How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)

by chunkyslink

https://archive.ph/7A8cW

by hsuduebc2

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...

by talloaktrees

When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.

by cmiles8

Agreed. Similarly, we had in-house chefs who were full-time employees. They were some of the first people laid-off when the Covid downturn hit.

by mykowebhn

Sounds like NYT is pushing another grift angle.

by tangenter

> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?

by andrewclunn

It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design

by etcimon

It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.

by setopt

Paywall. Is there an open link?

by giardini

> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.

According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.

by lapcat

That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.

by throw4847285

This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.

by dmfdmf

https://archive.ph/7A8cW

by ur-whale

I have a phd in philosophy, but I think this is more like a return of the 'court philosopher' profession.

by nathias

Posted days ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297

by Kaibeezy

In the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say:

“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”

Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.

Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.

High level abstraction and novelty.

More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.

Ephemera

by yaneverknow

When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.

Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.

by arjie

Wait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?

by DiscourseFan

I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.

From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.

by kriro

>“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.

This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.

by pcrh

revenge for 2 or maybe 10 philosophy majors, not for the cohorts of philosophy majors.

by pouetpouetpoue

the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter

by nytimesceo

Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!

It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.

by b450

This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger

by plastic-enjoyer

You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?

At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)

by satellite2

The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.

by applicative

> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious

I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything

by samrus

I majored in both CS and Philosophy. I think the very first paper I submitted for my phi 101 course was on the topic of machine ethics.

AI labs, I await your offers ;)

by csh0

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Hacker News
It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?
by beepbooptheory
How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)
by chunkyslink
https://archive.ph/7A8cW
by hsuduebc2
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...
by talloaktrees
When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
by cmiles8
Agreed. Similarly, we had in-house chefs who were full-time employees. They were some of the first people laid-off when the Covid downturn hit.
by mykowebhn
Sounds like NYT is pushing another grift angle.
by tangenter
> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
by andrewclunn
It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design
by etcimon
It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
by setopt
Paywall. Is there an open link?
by giardini
> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
by lapcat
That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.
by throw4847285
This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
by dmfdmf
https://archive.ph/7A8cW
by ur-whale
I have a phd in philosophy, but I think this is more like a return of the 'court philosopher' profession.
by nathias
Posted days ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297
by Kaibeezy
In the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say:
“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”
Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.
Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.
High level abstraction and novelty.
More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.
Ephemera
by yaneverknow
When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.
Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.
by arjie
Wait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?
by DiscourseFan
I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.
From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
by kriro
>“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.
This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.
by pcrh
revenge for 2 or maybe 10 philosophy majors, not for the cohorts of philosophy majors.
by pouetpouetpoue
the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter
by nytimesceo
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
by b450
This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger
by plastic-enjoyer
You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?
At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
by satellite2
The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
by applicative
> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious
I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
by samrus
I majored in both CS and Philosophy. I think the very first paper I submitted for my phi 101 course was on the topic of machine ethics.
AI labs, I await your offers ;)
by csh0