Philosophy in the age of AI

For most of its history, philosophy has been less about answers than about asking questions. That is what made Socrates both dangerous and memorable to Athenians. He did not write theories; he challenged certainties. He walked through the agora asking: What is truth? What is justice? How should one live? His legacy was not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking — a refusal to accept the convenient or the conventional without scrutiny. This spirit of questioning lay at the heart of education for much of history.

In independent India, philosophy remained marginal. It is absent from schools, mostly confined to a handful of electives in universities, and widely dismissed as an indulgence of the rich. Parents feared it would lead to unemployment; employers presumed it bred dreamers. Students themselves often asked, “What will I do with this degree?”

Yet the ground beneath education is shifting. Artificial intelligence now performs many of the tasks once entrusted to human learners. Machines draft essays, summarise reports, design solutions, and even simulate reasoning. If education was once about acquiring information or mastering procedures, that work is now outsourced to the thinking machines. The unsettling question is: what remains distinctively human?

The answer lies in the very thing philosophy has always cultivated — the art of questioning. AI is astonishingly good at delivering answers. But an answer without a good question is empty. Machines can be trained to generate queries, but they cannot feel the urgency of asking why. They cannot experience doubt, hesitation, or moral unease — the very conditions that make questioning an ethical human act. Philosophy trains us in precisely this: the discipline of asking questions.

This is why philosophical education must return to the centre of university life — not as the luxury of the privileged, but as a civic and professional necessity. In an era flooded with machine-made answers, human beings must learn to ask better questions: about meaning, justice, responsibility, possibility.

Parents anxious to see their children find jobs would do well to remember: the jobs of the future will be unstable, stable industries will collapse, new ones will emerge, and skills will age rapidly. In this world, a narrow technical training may secure a first job but rarely sustains a career. What lasts are habits of mind: the ability to analyse a problem from multiple angles, to see what is missing in a dataset, to challenge assumptions, to spot ethical blind spots. These are survival skills — and they are what philosophy, when taught well, provides.

Employers are beginning to recognise this. In technology firms, in finance, in healthcare and governance, the hardest problems are not about information but judgment. Should we automate this process? Should we trust this data? What risks are we ignoring? What values are we privileging? No algorithm can decide these for us. Leaders who can pose such questions, frame dilemmas clearly, and hold ethical lines are indispensable. Far from being a liability, philosophy graduates bring the intellectual flexibility and moral seriousness that organisations now need.

For students, the rewards are even deeper. Studying philosophy is the practice of freedom. It is to meet thinkers who refuse to let us be lazy: Plato demanding we define justice, Nietzsche unmasking truths as disguised desires, Simone Weil calling us to attend to suffering, and Wittgenstein exposing the limits of our own language. Philosophy does not hand us set answers; it teaches us to endure the difficulty of asking questions that matter.

There is also the question of our democratic future. A society that forgets how to ask questions is a society that forgets how to govern itself. Already, we see fake news spreading with velocity, conspiracy theories gaining ground, and slogans replacing arguments. Citizens trained to ask questions — seriously, responsibly — are the only real resistance.

The scepticism remains. Isn’t philosophy too abstract, too slow, too impractical for a world of rapid change? The reply is simple: the faster the change, the more we need disciplines that teach us to pause. The more information overwhelms us, the more we need training in sorting, judging, and resisting manipulation. The work of philosophy is never solitary. The Socratic method was never about humiliating opponents but about thinking together — refining ideas through challenge and response. In a time of polarisation, when public debate often descends into shouting, philosophy offers another model: disagreement without contempt, questioning without alienation.

However dazzling the work of thinking machines may be, philosophy must remain the guardian of the questions. Machines will not live with doubt. They will not wrestle with the unease of should we. That responsibility remains with human agents. Philosophy is not a relic of the past — it is a wager on the future of democratic societies in the age of thinking machines.

(The writer is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, Bengaluru)