Jonathan, a philosopher and content creator, reflects on why he initially felt threatened by AI and why he no longer does, using the shift as a lens to examine his own relationship with philosophy and what intellectual life is ultimately for.
Why AI felt existentially threatening
His first reaction to GPT-3 was awe and fear, not just for job security but because a craft he had spent years mastering—reasoning, argument reconstruction, logic, even math—appeared to be automated by a cold machine.
He compares his reaction to Augustine’s response to the fall of Rome: a sense that something eternal and impregnable had been breached.
He sees modernity as a series of humblings for humanity: Copernicus showed Earth is nothing special, Darwin showed human biology is nothing special, and now AI threatens the last source of human pride—being the most intelligent creatures in the universe.
Philosophy as production vs. philosophy as cultivation
He identifies two ways of treating philosophy:
As production: writing books, publishing papers, giving lectures, building a career, chasing tenure, views, and credentials.
As cultivation: philosophy as an art of life, a tool for becoming a more virtuous and better person, a way to grasp the deepest truths of the universe.
He realized his fear of AI came entirely from treating philosophy as production. If philosophy is primarily about output, then AI will make his work obsolete within years—it can already generate better lecture scripts and more compelling video delivery.
He draws on Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates critiques writing and asks whether you would plant a fruitful seed on the dead pages of a book or in the soil of a soul. Socrates, Epictetus, Confucius, Jesus, and Buddha never wrote anything—for them, philosophy was never about production.
If philosophy is cultivation, then his work is not wasted even when AI arrives. Every lecture and interview yields something profound he applies to his own life. In fact, if AI is better at figuring out the right metaphysical or ethical systems, he should welcome it.
Interiority as a remaining gap
Even on the production side, he sees defenses for human philosophers.
One is interiority: if you believe that good philosophy requires access to what it feels like to be human—not just external behavior and reasoning—then AI cannot fully replace the philosopher.
This means fields like phenomenology and ethics, which depend on lived human experience, will be more robust than fields like political or economic philosophy, which are more behavioral and analytical.
Personality as a remaining gap
Another defense is personality: the distinctive voice and literary character a philosopher brings to their work.
He contrasts the British analytical school, which injects almost no personality, with Continental thinkers like Rousseau, whose literary passages (such as the noble savage metaphor of a steed that would rather die in captivity) give a distinctive personality to the writing.
He predicts rhetoric will make a comeback because platforms like YouTube and podcasting replicate rhetoric at low cost, and rhetoric carries far more personality than writing. As AI cheapens writing simply by being able to do it, personality-driven communication becomes a moat.
Cultivation is not permanently safe either
He cautions against assuming cultivation will never be threatened. Nick Bostrom, in his book Deep Utopia, describes a future technology that could reprogram your synapses so you could “download” Hegel’s Phenomenology or become more virtuous at the push of a button, like Neo in The Matrix.
However, Bostrom argues this would be one of the final technologies humans ever create, because the brain is the most complex object we know of, requiring manipulation of billions or trillions of synapses.
So reading and absorbing knowledge is one of the last things that will be automated—it is the most defensible use of a philosopher’s time, safe until the very end of technological development.
AI turns philosophical questions into empirical ones
He is excited about a new interview series on the philosophy of AI, in partnership with Cosmos, launching early next year (he has already interviewed Nick Bostrom).
His core argument: throughout history, when new mechanisms arise, theoretical philosophical questions become empirical ones. Aristotle’s metaphysics became empirical physics in the 19th and 20th centuries. AI will do the same for philosophy.
Example: as an undergraduate, he debated Patricia Churchland on whether a purely deterministic Newtonian system could produce reasoning behavior. He argued it could, based on his CS and AI coursework. At the time (2017), the evidence was weak, but with models like OpenAI’s o3, deterministic systems now produce mathematical reasoning better than 99.9% of the population.
This is what excites him: AI transforms millennia of philosophical speculation into questions we can actually test and answer.
