AI in the Philosophy Job Market (guest post)

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a reporter working on a story about the extent to which AI, as a topic of research and an area of specialization demanded by employers, was becoming dominant in philosophy. Here’s one thing I said to her: People should be cautious when inferring how much philosophy of AI work is actually happening from how much philosophy of AI work they’re hearing about. AI is relatively new and highly socially significant, and so work on philosophy of AI is bound to get attention, and its novelty means it is likely to be more memorable when thinking about the state of philosophy more generally. Since AI and philosophy is establishing itself as a subdisciplinary field, there is a fair amount of hiring in it, forming research groups of scholars studying it, creating specialist journals for writing about it, establishing prizes to recognize good work in it, and so on. People will hear about these developments, as they’re newsworthy in the profession, but a lot of…