Asia embraces philosophy and AI courses

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.  

Grève also teaches a course on the metaphysics of AI at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as part of its master’s in AI, ethics and society, which launched in 2023. According to Grève, it is now among the biggest and most successful of such courses in Asia, with 400 students enrolled over three years.

Building on the success of the programme at Peking, Grève told Times Higher Education that “the next step” was to launch a master’s in applied ethics there. Last month, another top Chinese institution, Fudan University in Shanghai, announced a double major in AI and philosophy. The first of its kind in Asia, students will graduate with two degrees: one in philosophy and one in engineering.

Grève said that demand for such courses has been driven primarily by students. “The essays they want to write, the courses they want to take, their bachelor’s thesis, master’s thesis, PhD research, proposals and applications: it’s so quickly grown to be a lot on the philosophy of AI”, he said.

“We have so many different schools and departments that, somehow, are pivoting towards AI.”

Universities outside mainland China are also experimenting in the philosophy and AI field. De La Salle University (DLSU) in the Philippines has offered a bachelor’s in philosophy and artificial intelligence for the past two years, and the intake of incoming first-year students for the upcoming academic year “has quadrupled”, course creator, Jeane Peracullo who works in the department of philosophy, told Times Higher Education.

Lingnan University in Hong Kong launched a new bachelor’s degree in philosophy and AI last year. It is a senior-year programme that runs over two years, rather than a full four-year programme, and 16 students are currently enrolled.

Peter Hawke and Adam Bradley, who both work in Lingnan’s department of philosophy and are responsible for the programme, told Times Higher Education that the “rationale” for such a course was to offer humanities students “exposure to AI” without “expecting them to get a grip on the technical aspects to the same degree that a computer science student would”.

Although students are exposed to data analysis and basic Python programming, Hawke said that the programme “is not being pitched at heavily technical students”. He added that the focus is on “more traditional issues that animate philosophical discussion” such as questions of ethics, the nature of the mind and intelligence.

This represents a different approach to DLSU, where the programme is an interdisciplinary initiative shared between the colleges of liberal arts, computer studies, and business. Students take courses such as epistemology, aesthetics, computational thinking and advanced programming. Peracullo maintained that the goal is to “intentionally” blur “the boundaries between philosophical inquiry and technical AI proficiency”.

Speaking about aspirations for the inaugural cohort at Lingnan, Hawke said: “The idea is to have students who have a good technical understanding of what is going on…they’re the kind of people who understand how AI works, understand the limitations, and importantly, have a good understanding of the ethical and social dimensions”.

Philosophy has often been studied in combination with STEM subjects, including mathematics and physics. But many in the sector feel that the emergence of AI represents a new opportunity for one of the world’s oldest disciplines; Lingnan’s Bradley said that the skills of philosophers “suddenly” possess “broader utility”.

In May, Henry Shevlin, associate director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, was hired as a philosopher at Google DeepMind. The following month, Harvey Lederman, professor of philosophy at New York University, was hired by Anthropic to apply his research to AI alignment training. Both scholars have retained their academic affiliations.

Grève said that the hiring of academic philosophers by AI companies to train their foundational models “spells a good future” for universities. He highlighted the strengthening links between universities and industry, adding that such a move also benefits students enrolled at these institutions by “indirectly” connecting them with industry activity.

Not everyone in the sector shares this view, and there are concerns that a shift towards interdisciplinary degrees could mean that the arts are subsumed by STEM.

“I would hope that philosophy as a pure discipline would not disappear…that would be a loss to the university system and the intellectual life of society,” said Hawke.

“We’re moving into a world where, if AI is as important as we think it’s going to be, we would certainly want the arts, the humanities and the social sciences to step up and make sure that the skills and knowledge that we bring to the table are being integrated in the right way with the AI revolution.”

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com