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Notes -
Here's a prompt (heh):
To what extent is the field if AI Research a new means to do "real world" or applied philosophy? Academic philosophy is notoriously obtuse and inscrutable and, therefore, often of very limited real world / non-academic benefit. You will occasionally see academic philosophers who publish successful mainstream books, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In a different direction, hard analytic philosophy that uses propositional logic gets towards something that looks like a "system" of thought but, to me, seems to get blown out of the water in terms of practical application by the hard math and science people doing applied research (CERN comes to mind as an off hand example).
Does this deck of cards get reshuffled with AI?
This seems like a much better prompt for a philosopher.
My answer fits in a paragraph: I work with a lot of undergrad philosophy (and other humanities) majors at a top-5 liberal arts college known for humanities. Without exception, they suck using AI. They all think it is magical pixie dusk that can be waved on any problem to solve it. Philosophy professors aren't any better. A number of phil profs have commented to me about the decline in student quality due to students using AI as a crutch for their writing assignments, but it's not clear to me how much this is AI vs the secular trend of more sucky students vs just old professors being crotchety.
Okay, I lied, here's another paragraph: For philosophers to actually be able to make use of AI, or to provide insights into how humans work based on metaphors from AI, they need to understand the basics of computability. Scott Aaronson made a valiant attempt getting philosophers to recognize computability problems with his papers NP-Complete problems and physical reality and Why philosophers should care about computational complexity, but AFAIK the only people who have read these papers are computer scientists with a passing interest in philosophy. I have tried to start conversations on this topic with about 20 philosophers (both continental and analytic) and their eyes all instantly glaze over.
Damn it, I'm writing a 3rd paragraph. Way back in grad school (~10 years ago) I took a bunch of philosophy grad classes because I was interested in the problem of "what made people different from computers/AI". The most interesting result of this was me writing a paper What if Aristotle had been a Robot? that (roughly) tries to show how a robot could implement a virtue ethics system as an optimization problem (which is normally how people think of consequentialism). It's basically a badly written less-wrong article, and exactly 0 academics are interested in anything like this because it won't get you tenure because existing philosophers don't recognize it as philosophy.
Okay, fine, here's a 4th paragraph conclusion: There's been enough interesting stuff for the past 50 years in AI research for philosophers to get excited about, and they haven't. So I predict the LLM trend will not change anything.
Damn it again, here's a 5th paragraph: I'm just remembering my philosopher friend at a different university who has made the prediction that as writing "gets cheaper", more writing will be expected, and so tenure in the philosophy world will require much more output. This push for quantity will drive quality down, make tenure much harder to get, and make philosophers even more siloed/specialized than they already are. I agree with all this, but I think it applies across the board in all of academia, and these trends have been going on for so long that I don't think they can be attributed more than like 20% to AI.
There you go. You tricked me into an effort-ish post :)
Thank you for this. I'll be reading everything you listed. And I'll try to come up with an intentional effort post response.
Side note: You do realize that linking to your paper does self-dox? I assume you do, but just want to double check.
thanks for the doxx warning, but I've self doxxed this account before and consider it basically attached to my name
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