Philosophy and AI: a love affair

Why am I so excited by Artificial Intelligence, by the models that we use, by what it does to our work environment, to our societies, what it means for the future of humanity? It’s because I’m a philosopher, a philosopher at heart, and artificial intelligence engages philosophy on so many levels.

First my own specialisation. I’m fascinated by knowledge. When do we know that something is true? How do scientific models work? How do we model the world and act on the world in our scientific research, in our technology, as human beings?

Artificial intelligence is all about making models of the world, whether you do it through symbolic artificial intelligence, or generative or reinforcement learning. These are all attempts at working on a model of the world and then on working on the world. And that has far reaching consequences for science. The work of DeepMind in unravelling gaming and using it to model protein folding, which is revolutionising pharmaceuticals and the way medicines and molecules interact with our bodies. This is true across the board: whatever field of science you are engaged in, your work next year will be unlike what you’ve done before.

It’s not just this narrow element of modelling and science, it’s also what it means for our societies. How do we understand what this extra intelligence, if we want to call it that, or this extra material, is? It’s a simulacrum, a word which means that it resembles the thing that it is, without being it. It puts us into a different hyperreality, all concepts popularised by philosophers to understand the current constructed reality that we deal with, a reality of images, of texts, that is created, that is manipulated, that is partly artificial, and yet refers to the real. We need philosophical theories, we need philosophical concepts.

There are wider social questions. What it will mean for the future of work, for the future of our place in society, for human dignity, and the sense of what we do all day. Philosophers have always thought about what this element of human reality and human dignity is. How do we live in societies? How do we structure societies? How do we make sense of our lives? What role does work play, and status play, in our lives. All these are up for grabs. And again, some laboratories like DeepMind say that we need philosophers as well as economists and sociologists to start thinking about this future because it’s coming a lot faster than we think.

Finally, when this revolution and disruption comes, we are thrown back on the most fundamental questions of all, questions about meaning, the meaning of life. How do we give meaning to our lives separate from work, separate from status? How do we create our societies of the future with the technology that we have, with the ambitions that we have, with the side effects like ecological warming, and economic inequality? How do we structure the society of tomorrow? These are all aspects that philosophers think about. They are generalists who take elements of other disciplines to put together in a picture, a picture they know is constructed, is temporary, and which keeps shifting all the time.

I was triggered to reflect about this because I received a petition from Dundee University where they’re thinking about downsizing the philosophy department. I believe it’s pretty shortsighted. I know universities are always running a few decades behind what’s happening in the world, but this is what’s happening in the world: everything about humanity, about intelligence, about science, about society, about the meaning of life is being reconsidered, is being restructured, is being created.

If you want to educate people for that future, educating people in philosophy is a great idea. This is especially true of Dundee University, where one of the alumni is Amanda Askell, a woman who works on the morality of the chatbot Claude at the company Anthropic, who is at the heart of thinking about what these Large Language Models do and how they understand the world.

I trained as an academic philosopher in continental philosophy, in analytic philosophy, in Eastern philosophy when I worked in Japan. I taught at universities, but for the last 20 years, I’ve been engaged with companies and the challenges of large questions about the future of humanity and ecology and economics, because these fascinate me.

Philosophers have an important role to play in society, and they shouldn’t be shy about engaging with the world, even when they’re faced with scepticism. This again is our time. People are specifically asking for us, clamouring for us, so let’s respond to that call.

And for university departments who are training philosophers, this is your golden moment. Whatever financial challenges or university politics you have to deal with, you are educating the generalist thinkers of tomorrow, those who can combine a view of scientific models with social consequences and with the deeper sense of humanity’s search for meaning. Philosophers will be able to make sense of this future that is coming at such a rapid pace, will be able to analyse, will be able to explain, will be able to create and translate . Those are the people that we need on our side.

And for the young people who are confused about the future, who may be fearful that they will never get a full-time job, who have trepidations about what’s coming. Philosophical arguments, philosophical texts, philosophical discussions will allow you to make sense of it, to see that all of reality is constructed and that this is an ongoing process. We’ve been doing this for two and a half thousand years, but this is really our time.

Now that we’re facing these fundamental disruptions about what it means to do science, about how our societies work and about the deepest sense of meaning, let’s create the future. Let’s create a thriving humanity on a thriving planet. To me that’s incredibly exciting, and I hope that I’ve been able to communicate some of that excitement to you.