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Welcome, Professor Yampolskiy, welcome Roman! I’m very happy and honoured to have you here for this interview. Let us begin with you telling us a little about who you are and what your interests are in philosophical research. What are you currently working on?
Sure! I self-identify as a computer scientist; an engineer. I work at the University of Louisville. I’m a professor and I do research on AI safety. A lot of what I do ends up looking like philosophy, but, you know, we all
get PhD’s and we’re “doctors of philosophy,” so a computer scientist is a kind of applied philosopher; a philosopher who can try his ideas out. He can actually implement them and see if they work.
So what is your philosophical background then? Are you also professionally a philosopher?
Not in any formal way. I think I took an Introduction to Philosophy once and it was mostly about Marx’s Capital or something like that. So I had to teach myself most of it.
I also noticed that you have written lots of articles; some you wrote together with many different collaborators, some also on your own, and you are also writing books and you are almost continuously on Twitter… Since some early career philosophers might be watching or reading this interview, I was wondering if you have any advice for them on how to do this. How do you organise your time? How can you manage to be this very prolific philosopher and do all these other things on the side?
So it may not work for early career philosophers… I’m ten years on the job, so I have the power of saying no to almost everything I don’t care about. It’s much harder when you are just starting out. You have to say “yes, I love to teach another course! And, yes, your meeting sounds fascinating!” At this point, I don’t have to do that so I think that’s the main difference. I just look at the long-term impact of what is being offered in terms of time taken and what it’s going to do for me. Will I care about it five years later? And if the answer is “absolutely not,” why would I
do it?
So this is the secret? It’s just saying no to everything that is not research and not publishing?
And it’s very hard, because you want …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
