The Id, the Ego and the Superintelligence
Critchley argues that the hardest questions in advanced AI concern judgment, meaning and value, helping to explain why leading AI laboratories are hiring philosophers.
Summary
The article argues that AI’s capabilities strengthen rather than eliminate the need for philosophy. Systems can retrieve, summarise and recombine knowledge, yet the author distinguishes these abilities from judgment: the human capacity to decide what matters, weigh competing values and respond meaningfully to circumstances. Judgment is formed through lived experience, fallibility, memory and forgetting, and encounters with mortality, grief, boredom and social pressure – conditions an algorithm cannot acquire by absorbing internet data. This supposedly helps explain why Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI are bringing philosophers into work on machine character, ethics and principles for model behaviour. AI may perfect “artificial memory,” fulfilling an anxiety that reaches back to Plato (Phaedrus), but intelligence is not simply recall. Genuine thought requires selection, interpretation and concern. The central claim is that engineering alone cannot determine what intelligent systems ought to become; development must remain connected to philosophical reflection on meaning, value and judgment.
A Philosopher’s Thoughts
One objection might be that the contrast between machine reasoning and human judgment may be too categorical. Human judgment is shaped by pattern recognition, inherited concepts, social learning and imperfect memory, while AI systems can already be trained to rank values, revise conclusions and respond to context. Lacking mortality or grief does not by itself show that a system cannot exercise a functionally meaningful form of judgment. The stronger case for hiring philosophers is therefore not that AI can never judge, but that deciding what should count as good judgment is irreducibly normative.