Is Learning Dead? How AI is Changing Our Assumptions About Human Achievement

This lecture will consider the ways that powerful AI is now changing our philosophical assumptions about what human work and learning consists in. We'll look at how philosophers ranging from Aristotle to Simone Weil to Pope Leo XIV can guide us in navigating tricky policy debates and our own discernment about what it is to have a vocation when software can complete many tasks faster, better, and more efficiently than a human mind.

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Professor of Philosophy and Director of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The university hub for research and teaching in ethics, the Institute includes the new Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C, Center for Virtue Ethics and the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab. The Institute is home to faculty, program chairs, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and undergraduates and runs several residential fellowship programs for faculty, nonprofit leaders, and faith leaders. Sullivan currently directs a $50M grant with the Lilly Endowment to build a network of educators, faith leaders, technologists, journalists and others to consider what human formation looks like in the era of powerful AI. The model is called the DELTA –DELTA, a faith-informed approach rooted in enduring values: Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency. 

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.