Why now in Silicon Valley, the mecca of technology, more philosophers are needed

Among the numerous apocalyptic headlines that we read about the number of jobs that artificial intelligence will inevitably destroy, A tombstone seems carved in stone: The definitive death of the humanities.

However, it is enough to pay attention to what happens in universities around the world and in the most avant -garde companies of Silicon Valley to discover that As the algorithms are perfectedwhat becomes more valuable are those skills that are considered soft, such as critical judgment, connection and empathy.

According to the consultant Tyton Partnersthe percentage of American university professors who identify as “frequent users” of generative tools He almost doubled in a year.

It is a phenomenon we can imagine that it is replicated in other parts of the planetlike our country, and that is not well received by the recipients of these products, the students.

She Stapleton, a 22 -year -old student of organizational behavior at Northeastern, just demand that they return the eight thousand dollars that his family paid for his education After discovering that a teacher used chatgpt to evaluate an essay they had asked.

“They charge us to learn from humans, not a chatbot!” The New York Times. But what Stapleton doesn’t say is that his teacher is not alone in the classroom. From Its popularization in November 2022Chatgpt turned to a favorite tool of students and not only to write essays, but also to take notes, summarize texts and even train in front of oral late.

In this climate of hypocrisy between teachers and students, the traditional rules seem to have been too old and the educational pact that supposed efforts by the teacher and the student To achieve knowledge transmission seems broken.

However, it would be naive to think about it as A terminal crisis. In Anthropicthe startup founded by former employees of Openaiprogrammers and engineers with philosophers and musicians coexist.

There is not only a data processing power, but models of AI with “values ​​alignment”, where it is sought that their answers respect, for example, Ethical principles taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And today in the hearts of large technology companies, The key roles are being occupied, more and more, by whom they studied humanistic careers. The president of Anthropic He studied lyrics and responsible for his chatbot Claude, Amanda Askell, is a philosopher. Technology does not mark the end of human thought but puts it in crisis and forces him to reinvent himself.

We need humanists more than ever: not only in classrooms, but in research centers, in the media, in companies, in public policies. They are needed people capable of looking beyond the profitableto think about consequences, to remember what is worth preserving. Not to resist technology, but to accompany it without losing course.