The rise of AI has made it “probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle,” one philosophy graduate argued.

There is an old joke about philosophy degrees: “Could God make a degree so worthless even He couldn’t get hired?” But philosophers are now in high demand.

Anthropic’s Amanda Askell is one of the company’s most recognizable faces, WIRED noted; Google DeepMind has an in-house ethicist.

As AI becomes more powerful, ensuring it has values commensurate with those of humanity becomes more important, so establishing what those values actually are is ever more pressing. As the AI thinker Nick Bostrom warned in 2014, we now have “philosophy with a deadline.”