Philosophers have never seemed like the most employable bunch. But AI, the same technology that’s expected to drive many other people out of work, has given new weight to the kinds of questions they’re trained to ask: What is intelligence? What is a mind? “You have philosophers from hundreds of years ago who thought about some of the same problems,” Ajder says. “Now they are becoming material.” Two of the foremost AI labs have recruited teams of in-house philosophers. “There are significantly more philosophers now—that’s a sound intuition,” says ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads Google DeepMind’s team of research scientists specializing in the societal impact of AI. At Anthropic, resident philosopher Amanda Askell has become one of the company’s most recognizable faces. As philosophers at the labs help to sculpt AI models, producing prominent work cited in hundreds of subsequent research papers, so too is AI shaping the philosophy curricula at eminent universities. Plenty now run AI ethics courses or joint programs in computer science and philosophy. “It’s the kind of flavor of the year,” says Edward Harcourt, professor of philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Yet in academia, some regard the philosophers working for the labs with a degree of suspicion