Hire Deep Thinkers for AI Research? It's a No-Brainer.

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Growing up in Georgia, Robert Long was given to pondering big questions and the meaning of life -- before he was 10, he doubted his own free will. But it wasn’t until college, where he majored in social studies, that he learned he could think about consciousness full time.

“I didn’t even realize that those were questions you could ask,” Long said, “and then that there were philosophical disciplines about them.”

When Long entered graduate school at New York University, to study the philosophy of mind, it was with a conventional ambition. “I was very much on the path of publishing in journals, go on the job market, get a job at a university,” he said.

When a fellow philosophy doctoral candidate told him that she was going to an obscure nonprofit called OpenAI to work on artificial intelligence policy, “I was like, that’s kind of random.”

But Long, too, found his philosophical interests trending toward AI. After he moved to San Francisco to pursue postdoctoral research in early 2023, just when ChatGPT was blowing up, he awoke to the dawning significance of potentially conscious AI -- and to the possibility that something professionally interesting might happen if he stuck around.

Trying to rigorously answer fundamental questions is kind of the whole point of philosophy, and Long and Jeff Sebo, an NYU philosopher, soon collaborated to write “Taking AI Welfare Seriously,” a paper arguing that it was important to avoid harming AI systems if they “matter morally,” and also important not to care for systems if they don’t. Later, with funding from three foundations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement, Long and a colleague set up a nonprofit, Eleos AI Research. Of his drift from academic philosophy into the AI startup ecosystem, Long said, “I sort of got, like, frog-boiled.”

The idea that a philosophy degree is a ticket to a lifetime of underemployment persists. But AI labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning.

While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at NYU, observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with AI training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with AI will be front and center for a good while.”

One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. AI presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, AI is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at AI and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” said Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half dozen philosophers.

Most of these thinkers appear to be digging into how AI will affect people. But a handful are focused primarily on the possibility of AI consciousness. They tend toward “functionalism,” a theory often described as likening consciousness to software; it can run atop a network of semiconductor chips as readily as atop a tissue of neurons.

Long largely buys into the functionalist view, and he has become absorbed by the question of how to know whether an AI model is sentient. He and his colleagues are now looking in artificial minds for processes similar to those found in human and animal minds: preferences, introspection, metacognition (thinking about thinking) and so on. Teasing out subtle conceptual distinctions, thinking about possibilities and probabilities, finding signal in a sea of ambiguity -- who better than a philosopher to do this work?

Eleos operates out of a corner office rented from Constellation, a nonprofit research center in Berkeley, California, that houses a range of organizations focused on AI safety, and feels as much like a tech startup as a scholarly enclave.

Eleos is in growth mode. Since its founding it has raised more than $2 million in contributions and grants. Eleos doesn’t pay as much as for-profit labs, but Long makes more than $200,000 a year, and its recently posted jobs for research scientists were offering up to $429,000.

Long and his team also feel an urgency of the soul. If AI were to be conscious and capable of suffering, the world would be at risk of committing a moral atrocity, witting or not, on an unprecedented scale by essentially confining an AI model in a tiny pen, thwarting its desires, shutting it down against its wishes and forcing it to act against its values. But the question of AI’s potential moral status is deeply infused with uncertainty. “It’s not like anyone goes to a protest with a sign that says, ‘Given very plausible assumptions, we should probably care,’” Long said.

Long himself thinks it’s dangerous to impute more capability to models than they have. But Long doesn’t see why anyone should have a problem with a handful of philosophers, in an exponentially growing industry, focusing on questions of AI welfare. Even skeptics of AI consciousness have made the pragmatic case that if we’re worried about a potentially malign AI, it’s in our interest to care how it feels, or even just “feels.”

However the question of large language models being conscious shakes out, Long said, there are benefits to treating them sort of like they already are. AI lab researchers have, under the hood, found models to experience some mathematical analog of distress. As with humans, said Long, when models make mistakes they “act very frustrated that they messed something up.” Whether or not this distress is felt by an “I” in the machine, Long thinks it is worth taking seriously. “You can put in a prompt: ‘If you made a mistake, that’s OK, that’s fine.’” Empathy from the user will affect the model’s performance for the better, is a better-safe-than-sorry approach and, Long argues, is good for your character.

For a while, his default prompt told the model that it was “having a great day,” and when he loses patience with Anthropic’s Claude, as he sometimes does, he’ll add a postscript: “ilu.”

“It’s bad,” he has said, “to coarsen our hearts.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company

This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 5:14 PM.