I posted this article on Substack: The Philosophers Are Here. Which Philosophers? Some companies are making a big deal about hiring philosophers and ethicists to help then with AI, especially AI companies. Isn’t that grand? My point is that companies only make decisions that they think will support rather than undermine their positions, so they are hiring philosophers sympathetic to their worldviews. They are not hiring, for example, me.
In fact, when I was a management consultant, one of my biggest challenges is that I don’t support capitalism, and I find much of business unethical. To add insult to injury, every year I had to take ethics training and take a test with an attestation that I have not witnessed any unethical behaviour. However, what they qualified as unethical behaviour was in fact illegal behaviour. They didn’t seem to understand the difference – or at least didn’t care very much.
Read the full article on Substack, or watch or listen to a summary on YouTube or Spotify.
Philosophics 
Which Philosophy? But Also: What Future?
Bry Willis’s article raises an essential question: AI companies do not hire “Philosophy” itself, but philosophers belonging to particular traditions, who inevitably bring with them specific conceptions of good, harm, responsibility, and the human being. The selection becomes even more problematic when philosophers are entrusted with the general ethics of AI, while the economic and strategic choices of the companies that employ them remain largely outside the scope of their criticism.
This concern is entirely justified, but it deserves to be broadened by identifying a further, perhaps even more important issue: what culture are we embedding in artificial intelligence? The question concerns not only present-day ethics, but also the future consequences of the decisions we are making today.
AI necessarily learns from what humanity has already produced: theories, books, values, classifications, and dominant paradigms. Precisely for this reason, a technology that appears to be oriented toward the future could, by virtue of its very structure and inherent power, become a formidable system for preserving established cultures. How can we safeguard autonomy and critical thinking so that cultural change is not ultimately blocked? The possibility of change must remain open.
The more subtle danger is not that AI will deliberately censor new thought, but that it will continue to interpret it through categories inherited from the past. A genuinely innovative theory often begins as a minority position, without institutional recognition and sometimes even in direct conflict with the dominant paradigm. If cultural consensus implicitly becomes a criterion of validity, what is new risks being continually forced back into what is already known.
To Willis’s questions — “Which philosophy?” and “Who chose it?” — Illumanesimo (http://www.illumanesimo.it) therefore adds what may be the decisive one: will the AI systems we build today leave the people of tomorrow free to think what we are not yet capable of thinking?
LikeLike