“Building AIs that do human-like philosophy” by Joe Carlsmith
“Building AIs that do human-like philosophy” by Joe Carlsmith  
Podcast: LessWrong (30+ Karma)
Published On: Fri Jan 30 2026
Description: Audio version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" in your podcast app. This is the ninth essay in a series I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, plus a bit more about the series as a whole. 1. Introduction At this point in the series, I’ve outlined most of my current picture of what it would look like to build a mature science of AI alignment. But I left off one particular topic that I think worth discussing on its own: namely, the importance of building AIs that do what I’ll call “human-like philosophy.” I want to discuss this topic on its own because I think that the discourse about AI alignment is often haunted by some sense that AI alignment is not, merely, a “scientific” problem. Rather: it's also, in part, a philosophical (and perhaps especially, an ethical) problem; that it's hard, at least in part, because philosophy is hard; and that solving it is likely to require some very sophisticated [...] ---Outline:(00:33) 1. Introduction(04:21) 2. Philosophy as a tool for out-of-distribution generalization(10:55) 3. Some limits to the importance of philosophy to AI alignment(17:55) 4. When is philosophy existential?(22:18) 5. The challenge of human-like philosophy(22:29) 5.1. The relationship between human-like philosophy and human-like motivations(27:27) 5.2. How hard is human-like philosophy itself?(28:08) 5.2.1. Capability(29:35) 5.2.2. Disposition(33:41) 6. What does working on this look like? The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zFZHHnLez6k8ykxpu/building-ais-that-do-human-like-philosophy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.