Philosophy Grads Sought for Careers in AI!

Helen Margetts is professor of society and internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and public policy program director at The Alan Turing Institute.

Helen Margetts
I spent a day this week interviewing philosophers. We need one to take up a postdoctoral position in ethics on our public policy program at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI. We need someone to help government navigate the complex ethical issues involved in using artificial intelligence for policymaking. Our current fellow is working nights and weekends. He has just written the UK government’s guidance on AI ethics and safety for the public sector.

We are not the only ones in the UK hiring. Similar positions are advertised at the Oxford Internet Institute, my home department at the University of Oxford, and countless other institutions.

The career prospects of philosophers were not always this promising. Only a few years ago, discouraged undergraduates would complain that despite the intellectual rigor of their degrees, the only interview preparation they had to do after graduating was practicing how to ask: “Would you like fries with that?”. Even newly minted PhDs struggled in the job market. Academic openings were few. Now, these same philosophers are in high demand to research the ethics of data and technology.

The interest of so many philosophers in technology is also new. The social sciences and humanities were slow to recognize the importance of technology, either for what they studied or how they studied it. This week’s announcement of a £150m donation to fund a new humanities hub for Oxford plus an institute of ethics and AI, was hailed as a sign of how much has changed.

As a budding political scientist, I wrote my PhD about information technology in government in the 1990s. At the time this was a sad and lonely thing to do; neighbors in the London School of Economics dining room would cast their eyes around for a “normal” political scientist who could pass on some Westminster gossip. Then along came the internet, the first IT to be domesticated in our social, economic and political networks, followed by huge digital platforms based on processing massive quantities of data generated by human interactions, and the current AI revolution. I have a better time at dinner parties these days.

Data-intensive technologies — usually, and often inaccurately, labelled artificial intelligence — are having a profound effect on research and challenging the boundaries of the fields that feed the pipeline of technology specialists.

Those who are expert in manipulating huge data sets and complex networks — engineers, physicists and computer scientists — have traditionally trained on data relating to materials, cells, atoms, bits. When they enter the huge industry that has grown up around platforms of Facebook, Amazon, Google, most data they deal with relates to people. But the academic training ground for understanding human behavior is social science — including economics, anthropology, sociology and political science — the concepts and methods of which bore most engineers to tears.