Henry Ajder, a philosophy postgraduate who advises the UK government and startups on artificial intelligence, remarks that it's perhaps one of the best times to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great.

The technology expected to drive many out of work is now giving new weight to questions philosophers have long pondered. What is intelligence? What is a mind?

Two of the foremost AI labs, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, have recruited teams of in-house philosophers. At DeepMind, Iason Gabriel leads research on societal impact, while Amanda Askell at Anthropic has become one of the company’s most recognizable faces.

While the magnetism lies in questions about consciousness and superintelligence, much of the work revolves around immediate risks: fairness, misinformation, malicious misuse, and errant agents. Julia Haas, a philosopher of mind at DeepMind, is developing frameworks for testing moral competence in large language models.