July 2026
What AI leaders tell their children
For years, I've joked that I earned the least employable degree imaginable: Philosophical Theology. It's difficult to improve upon that combination if your goal is alarming your practical parents.
Apparently, I was simply decades ahead of the job market.
A Wall Street Journal article this spring reported on what leaders in artificial intelligence are telling their own children about preparing for work in an AI-shaped future. Their answers were surprisingly consistent. No one pretended to know what jobs will exist in ten years -- or even two. But they agreed that the most valuable skills will be profoundly human ones: creativity, ethical judgment, critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to make meaning.
In other words, not Artificial Intelligence, but Ancient Intelligence.
Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of Anthropic, observed that humans have an enduring desire to create, collaborate, and find meaning. Microsoft's chief scientist, Jaime Teevan, emphasized "metacognitive skills" -- thinking about our own thinking, questioning assumptions, and adapting to new information. SAP executive Caroline Hanke highlighted ethics and human judgment. Others pointed to empathy, service, and caring for both people and the natural world.
Those are not new skills. They are the very qualities philosophy has been cultivating for more than two thousand years.
Revenge of the philosophers
That may explain an unexpected trend. During the very same week, both The Economist and The New York Times reported that AI companies are actively recruiting philosophers.
The Economist noted that philosophy graduates are now less likely to be unemployed than computer science graduates. According to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, 5.1% of philosophy graduates were unemployed in 2024, compared with 7% of computer science graduates.
Even more surprising, new graduates in philosophy are being hired directly by AI companies.
Why?
Because today's AI systems don't simply need better programming. They need better reasoning.
The Socratic method -- the ancient practice of asking careful questions to expose contradictions and clarify ideas -- is proving unexpectedly useful for training AI systems to reason more effectively. So is Socrates' famous admission that genuine wisdom begins with recognizing how much we don't know. That kind of intellectual humility turns out to be an antidote to one of AI's biggest weaknesses: overconfident “hallucinations.”
As The New York Times observed, AI raises questions tailor-made for philosophers. What counts as knowledge? How should one make intelligent decisions, as a person -- or as a machine? What responsibilities do humans have toward each other? Do we have that same responsibility to our intelligent machines? These are questions about ethics, logic, consciousness, and truth -- the very subjects philosophy has explored for centuries.
Not bad for a discipline long caricatured as preparation for asking, "Would you like fries with that?"
How to advise your student
So, should your student major in philosophy?
Not necessarily.
The deeper lesson is that students should seek opportunities to develop the habits of mind philosophy teaches. Are they learning to evaluate evidence? To question assumptions? To recognize the limits of their own knowledge? To wrestle with ethical dilemmas? To think about how they think?
Those habits can begin long before college.
One outstanding example is the International Baccalaureate course Theory of Knowledge (TOK). Rather than memorizing facts, students examine how knowledge itself is constructed. They ask why science, history, religion, mathematics, and the arts arrive at truth in different ways. They learn to identify assumptions, evaluate evidence, and become more intellectually curious.
Implications for Admissions
From an admissions standpoint, that's gold.
Selective colleges consistently look for evidence of intellectual curiosity, and TOK puts that quality on full display. Even students who are not pursuing the full IB Diploma may, at some schools, be permitted to enroll in or audit the course.
Ironically, as AI grows ever smarter, the qualities that matter most may be the oldest ones we possess.
It turns out that the future belongs not to students who can write code, but to those who know how to ask better questions.
Socrates would probably smile.
Then he'd ask whether we're quite sure about that.
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Would you like your student to think more deeply about their college plans and applications? Be in touch with this philosopher.