Bakalar got in on the ground floor of AI ethics by starting to talk and think about it in academic settings as a side-interest in the late 2010s. When the sector took off like a rocket in early 2023 after ChatGPT, it was these already-engaged people (regardless of degree field or technical skill) who had the personal and professional connections to get hired and promoted rapidly into lucrative "ethicist" positions at AI companies. A lot of them were poli-sci/public policy types, rather than philosophers or computer scientists.