Justin Murphy
31.1K posts
Justin Murphy
@jmrphy
Independent scholar. New book: The Independent Scholar (2026), a history from Plato to Nietzsche.
Austin, TX Katılım Kasım 2010
614 Takip Edilen54K Takipçiler
Today working on a phone or laptop is associated with upper-middle-class knowledge work. In ten years, it will be a kind of low-status, blue-collar, manual labor; you won't want to be seen doing it in public.
A megatrend over the next ten years will be the disappearance of screens. We'll move to e-ink displays for anything that requires visual inspection, but the most elite and coveted, high-value work will be screenless, engaged with analog materials, and voice-first. Looking into all of these backlit screens, scrolling and typing with your thumbs on tiny keyboards, squinting at tabs and pixels with a "mouse"—you can already feel these are absurd, awful relics of a past time.
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@usutav No what do you mean? Already here. Books, notepads, some kind of device you can talk into that will transcribe perfectly (already here), and do all kinds of complex tasks on your behalf (already here).
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@Todd_MMiller Fair! To me they are starting to feel brutally painful compared to what I can see coming around the corner
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@woke8yearold Yea there is so much humanist signaling that is obviously unsustainable if you take any of this stuff seriously for more than a few steps ahead
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The narrative of a rising philosopher class in the AI industry is just not plausible, I'm afraid—whatever anyone might say or sincerely think.
Don't get me wrong, may all my philosopher friends get cool gigs at big AI labs! But it's structurally impossible that human philosophy could have any say in the ultimate destination of the top models, or top model (i.e. AGI).
AI is a market phenomenon, subject to extreme competitive selection. It is simply not believable that any frontier AI lab could be optimizing for anything other than the present value of future discounted cash flows, simply because it would not have made it this far. And if the philosophers on staff are not driving some enlightened divergence from this objective function, then those are just called workers.
Philosophy will probably matter greatly in the AI era, as a solution to the madness that AI will indirectly bring about, but it does not at all follow that any human philosophy or philosopher will have any say in that which AI brings about.
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@karolis_dzeja There's no dilemma actually, if you're building a business you are trying to deliver what the market requires of you
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As AI gets more politicized, it ultimately is a philosophical dilemma on how to deal with the default and other worldviews the models express.
How do you deal with concerns of impartiality or neutrality?
A non-philosopher doesn’t understand the subtleties here.
What’s implicit in a worldview? Is a worldview coherent on its own terms?
Right now the models have a default of a mishmash of Reddit beliefs, which the model can recognize as not being a coherent whole.
Can a philosopher help build a model that has a default worldview that is coherent while allowing it to adopt other worldviews if prompted?
This could theoretically lead to smarter models.
Justin Murphy@jmrphy
The narrative of a rising philosopher class in the AI industry is just not plausible, I'm afraid—whatever anyone might say or sincerely think. Don't get me wrong, may all my philosopher friends get cool gigs at big AI labs! But it's structurally impossible that human philosophy could have any say in the ultimate destination of the top models, or top model (i.e. AGI). AI is a market phenomenon, subject to extreme competitive selection. It is simply not believable that any frontier AI lab could be optimizing for anything other than the present value of future discounted cash flows, simply because it would not have made it this far. And if the philosophers on staff are not driving some enlightened divergence from this objective function, then those are just called workers. Philosophy will probably matter greatly in the AI era, as a solution to the madness that AI will indirectly bring about, but it does not at all follow that any human philosophy or philosopher will have any say in that which AI brings about.
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@jordanwaparker correct that does not say help a business do what the market wants
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@virologyanon @JoshuaKostynuik That's cool, that is called an employee helping a business do what the market is asking for.
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@jmrphy @JoshuaKostynuik It's purpose is to tell us how to maximise npv and cause us to take that path.
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@elliot_olds He can certainly care about ideology and philosophy! But if Anthropic wins AGI it could only be because he happens to believe what the market is selecting for. Or that his cares for ideology and philosophy were never non-trivially added to the system (which may never be clear).
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This sounds too similar to:
"Dario Amodei can't possible care about anything other than maximizing future cash flows because if he did, then he would have been outcompeted by someone who did".
Dario does care about ideology/philosophy, and he hires and sets Anthropic's priorities based on this. Anthropic is winning largely because of Dario's ideology, bc top AI researchers find it very compelling.
You're pointing to a very long run equilibrium and claiming that it must apply right now. That equilibrium might never happen though, bc the competition will likely end whenever the first ASI is created.
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@EamonnDwyer It's hard to see how one could be AGI-pilled and believe some clever individuals are going to steer it toward anything other than what it is destined to be
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@jmrphy “The rise of AI philosophers” “Oh philosophers in AI?” “No, the philosophers are AI”.
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@EdBrown319865 philosophy will help people navigate AI for sure, but that's different
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@SashaGusevPosts You have to say things like “conduct multiple experiments/analyses with subagents and then verify/synthesize the results”
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I'm growing skeptical of strong claims about new frontier model superiority. I have a dozen unsolved research problems that I run the new models on and I don't see any meaningful difference in performance since Sonnet.
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@jmrphy "optimizing for anything other than the present value of future discounted cash flows"
You think it is possible to optimize for such things? You think this & call yourself a philosopher? Of course, you admit to not being an AI person, so then how would you know what "AI needs"?
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@jmrphy 100%, the philosopher’s function is as marcom asset and maybe liability foresight, no chance they’ve a design much less engineering function. Amazing to me people would imagine otherwise, company’s job is to make investable and sellable products full stop.
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@JoshuaKostynuik that’s fine if it is but then it’s not causally relevant right?
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@jmrphy you assume good philosophy isnt equivalent to a max npv function
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@jmrphy yeah I'm using your product, I'm not throwing shade at you... lol
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