The "growing market demand for ontologists"
Yesterday's posts were thinking-intensive. This one is mostly an excuse to link to this amazing press release (via this tweet), with a pull quote I can't stop rereading:
"It’s a watershed moment in the history of AI and we’re here to meet the growing market demand for ontologists."
Notes:
- This is the sort of thing that would have generated one heck of an email chain among the grad students when I was doing my philosophy Ph.D.
- Back when The Good Place was on TV, I remember not being able to decide whether it was more surprising that (i) there was a major sitcom set in a philosophy class or (ii) that such a sitcom was enjoyable.
- I don't mean to be snarking. Ontology is in fact very important, and academic philosophers are in fact uniquely positioned to do it well. I am not a labor market prognosticator; I'm just stunned and amused that this is all real.
- Really, getting the data model right matters a lot, and it's particularly hard for organizations to do, and you need good ontology to get good data models.
- I would not recommend the press release's definition of ontology, but I do not envy the writer's job. Ontology (in the software sense) is a hard thing to define in the best of circumstances, and even harder in a document aiming to appeal to (i) many people (ii) who, if they have heard of ontology, do not agree about what it is and (iii) are either way not so likely to be able to produce a good definition of it. (I have my opinions, but will not attempt a definition here.)
- One of the most amusing meetings of my career so far was an introductory 1-on-1 at a big company with our organization's ontologist. She was not expecting a random programmer to have a philosophy Ph.D., much less one in metaphysics, and she was not entirely sympathetic to my view that various bits of Plato and Aristotle were very important to the work we were doing.