Google DeepMind recently hired Cambridge University philosopher Henry Shevlin with the official title of “Staff Philosopher.” The arrival of an era that demands his expertise—researching machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and the social and ethical challenges posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sent ripples through academia. Questions once dismissed as ivory tower speculation have now become core agenda items at the world’s leading AI research labs.
This movement is hardly unique to DeepMind. University of Texas philosophy professor Harvey Lederman has also joined the technical research team at Anthropic, a company at the forefront of AI safety and value alignment. The reason this orthodox analytic philosopher—who has spent his career studying philosophy of language and logic—made the move is clear: large language models (LLMs) need structural alignment that goes beyond learning ethics from text manuals, enabling them to practice morality consistently in actual behavior and judgment. Philosophers are no longer confined to external advisory roles; they are now directly participating on the front lines of designing the architecture of AI systems.
Anthropic publicly released its “Claude Constitution”—a kind of ethical charter—and engaged religious figures, economists, and civil society activists in discussions about AI’s moral standards. OpenAI has likewise hired anthropologists and social scientists in significant numbers to analyze how ChatGPT users interact with AI.
On the surface, the phenomenon appears straightforward: Big Tech companies are hiring humanities scholars. But beneath the surface lies a deeper narrative. For the first time in the history of technology, we are confronting a moment where technology itself is asking humanity: “What does it mean to be human?” The more advanced technology becomes, the more urgently we need not faster chips, but a deeper understanding of humanity.
The Collapse of the Neutral Technology Myth
We once believed technology was neutral. The argument that a hammer can build a house or harm a person—and that responsibility lies with the human wielding the tool—was long favored by technology optimists. But that premise is crumbling. AI is not a mere tool. Algorithms make recommendations, offer advice, assist hiring decisions, and support medical diagnoses. In this process, the question of which values to embed and which biases to correct is no longer an engineering problem—it is a sophisticated question of political philosophy.
Understanding society requires deep insight into human nature beyond data. Algorithms are built on data, but data is saturated with human culture, history, and prejudice. Microsoft’s “Responsible AI” organization and Google’s consciousness research group both point in the same direction. Technology can no longer evade questions of value; technology development itself has become an act of value judgment.
The Intersection of Technological Competitiveness and Humanistic Insight
There is another, distinctly pragmatic reason global Big Tech companies are hiring philosophers: a crisis of trust. As vague fear and distrust of AI spread, companies must secure social legitimacy. We have entered a world where declaring “we are human-centered and ethical” has become more important than boasting about technological superiority. The question “Can AI be conscious?” was once merely an abstract hypothesis for philosophers, but with the emergence of AI that renders the Turing test obsolete, it has now moved into the realm of regulation, law, and social contract.
Yet even as tech companies desperately need humanistic insight, Google and some other Big Tech players are experiencing unexpected struggles in the AI productization race. In July 2026, Google’s flagship AI model Gemini fell outside the top 10 in composite rankings from multiple global LLM evaluation organizations. Google was the pioneer that introduced the Transformer architecture to the world in 2017, laying the technical foundation for the generative AI era. But in the market, it is being overtaken not only by OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude 4, and Meta’s Llama 4, but also by latecomers like xAI’s Grok-3.
Google’s underperformance stems not from a lack of technology but from a strategic dilemma. While the company hesitated to fully deploy generative AI—which could cannibalize its core business model generating over $200 billion in annual search advertising revenue—OpenAI’s ChatGPT surpassed 100 million users in just two months, completely reshaping the market landscape. Google’s belatedly launched AI model Bard made factual errors during its public demonstration, triggering a single-day market capitalization loss of $100 billion.
Although Google subsequently unified its brand under Gemini, model update speeds lagged behind competitors, and its position in the developer ecosystem narrowed. Cultural clashes triggered by the organizational integration of Google DeepMind and Google Brain, along with the departure of key research talent, acted as internal factors hampering technological progress.
Google’s current situation dramatically illustrates how difficult it is to chase both the speed of technology and the depth of values. If AI is a system that learns human language and culture, the proposition that those who understand humans most deeply can design the most exceptional AI is clearly valid—but the organizational execution required to translate that humanistic insight into products and market dominance is an entirely different challenge.
The Birth of Civilization-Designing Companies and Questions for South Korea
Tech companies are now transforming beyond simple IT manufacturing and service firms into “civilization-designing companies.” A civilization-designing company does not merely sell products; it structures what people know and believe, who they form relationships with, and how they make judgments. AI companies are redesigning the very modes of human thought, emotion, and judgment, intervening in education, labor, democracy, and even the ways we love. The real reason for hiring philosophers and anthropologists is that tech companies have begun to perceive themselves as entities that design the order and sensibilities of human society.
The question this poses for South Korean society is clear. South Korea is staking everything on infrastructure investment and technological competitiveness—semiconductors, data centers, physical AI, large language models—but how much dialogue is actually taking place between technology and the humanities? With growing social interest in AI ethics and human essence, the necessity of philosophy is once again gaining attention. Yet in South Korean universities, foundational humanities majors including philosophy and literature continue to face pressure from departmental consolidation and enrollment cuts. The hierarchy between engineering and humanities faculties in research budget allocation remains firmly entrenched, and pathways for scholars researching AI ethics and technology criticism to substantively participate in corporate design processes or government policy-making are woefully inadequate.
Ultimately, a competition has begun: whichever camp achieves a deeper understanding of human desires and vulnerabilities will create the most beneficial and sophisticated technology for humanity. This is not a romantic appeal to rescue the humanities—it is a strategic judgment for survival. If AI is a system that learns human language and culture, then those who understand humans most deeply can design the most exceptional AI.
What matters is not merely coding ability. It is the power to understand what humans desire, what they fear, and what they seek to protect. The sight of a philosopher seated in a Silicon Valley conference room is a signal flare announcing that a new dialogue between technology and the humanities has begun. Only when society as a whole refuses to stop asking questions about humanity amid technological acceleration can this technology become not a fire that destroys us, but a proper mirror that illuminates us. Planting human questions in the heart of the machine—that is the solemn task entrusted to all of us living in the AI era.