#PhilosophyMatters: The AI Labs Are Hiring Philosophers The discipline that launched a thousand jokes about unemployable graduates has become unexpectedly essential. "So, I think I'm going to major in philosophy" has been alarming tuition-paying parents for generations. Yet the world's leading AI labs are now hiring people as fluent in Aristotle and Mill as in reinforcement learning. One philosopher at Anthropic oversees the 23,000-word constitution that shapes the character of its AI model, Claude, while a research nonprofit in Berkeley spends its days asking whether these systems might one day deserve moral consideration at all. It turns out that when a technology starts raising questions about mind, truth and how to treat one another, you need people who have spent their lives thinking clearly about exactly that.

Australia feels more divided than it should, and if that frustrates you, you're not alone. Humanists believe we can build a better society through compassion, reason, and community, without needing to agree on everything else first. This World Humanist Day (June 21), join us for a participatory conversation about the future of Humanism in Australia. This isn't a lecture. You'll spend most of the event in small-group discussions with other people who share your values, exploring what role Humanism should play in Australian public life, what issues the movement should be championing, and how we reach the millions of Australians who hold humanist values but don't know it yet. Your ideas will be collected and fed directly to the leadership of Humanists Australia to help shape what comes next. You don't need to be a member and you don't need to have all the answers. You just need to care about building a more thoughtful, compassionate, and rational Australia.

The 2026-27 Federal Budget: A Humanist Scorecard

The 2026-27 Federal Budget offers humanists reason for both cautious optimism and real concern. On the positive side, landmark reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax finally acknowledge housing as a fundamental need, CSIRO has received a meaningful funding boost, and $1 billion will ensure older Australians aren't charged for basic personal care like showering. Yet this is also a budget built on $63.8 billion in savings (with $37.8 billion coming from the NDIS alone) while leaving base rates of JobSeeker and Rent Assistance untouched, even as expert after expert warns these payments are too low to keep people out of poverty. With gross national debt approaching $1 trillion, the tension between fiscal responsibility and our obligations to the most vulnerable will only intensify. As humanists, we welcome reform grounded in reason and compassion, but we must also ask who this budget leaves behind.