'' PHILOSOPHERS -MIND- CONSCIOUSNESS " : A.I. MASTER ESSAY

FOR ETHICISTS in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

'' When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,'' said Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher, who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team.

'' They're almost everywhere.''

WHEN Google DeepMind announced in April that it was hiring someone whose actual business-card title would be '' Philosopher, '' the memes really flowed.

'' It's so the A.I. can learn what it feels like to have a college degree and still be unemployed,'' someone posted on X. Of philosophy majors' job precarity, a Redditor contributed :

'' Half are pulling espresso shots while silently debating whether the customer who ordered oat milk truly exists.''

But Mr. Robert Long's trajectory and Google's new hire were in line with a quietly building trend : A.I. labs, and the related nonprofit organisations 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 monetise 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.''

One of humanity's oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other.

A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with truth, belief and knowledge [ epistemologists ], of reasoning [logicians], of mind and consciousness [ philosophers of mind and consciousness].

Thus it was that, as the sun set over San Francisco Bay on a recent Thursday, Mr. Long was on a high floor of an office tower in Berkeley discussing one of modern civilization's most intractable puzzles :

Who was the best Beatle?

This Master Essay Publishing continues to Part [2]. !WOW! thanks The New York Times.