University courses combining artificial intelligence and philosophy are surging in popularity across Asia, driven by the demand for graduates who can understand and use generative technologies as well as critically evaluate them.
With technology firms hiring philosophy professors to tackle questions around intelligence and consciousness, universities have reported that courses launched in the past few years have quickly become some of their most popular – breathing new life into a discipline that has long struggled amid an increased focus on “employability”.
In China, universities have been steadily incorporating AI and philosophy into the curriculum for some time, often in the form of specialisation within an existing programme.
Sebastian Sunday Grève, associate professor at the Department of Philosophy at Peking University, created a course on the philosophy of AI in 2020 after being “immediately” struck by “how AI was already on everyone’s minds.”
When the course started, Grève said that “technical students weren’t really interested [in it] at the time”. But now, “more and more technical students” are interested in the interplay of philosophy and AI. Grève added that many students feel that they need “an understanding of some philosophical ideas or theory” to make progress in solving technical challenges.
