DELTA x Hard Fork
We're doing it live!
If your media diet is as varied and far flung (healthy) as ours, you may have come across the concept of ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ sometime in or around 2018 when Elon Musk and Grimes first got together. (If not, you can start down the rabbit hole here.) Or maybe you’ve seen more recent coverage of a fall 2025 seminar series led by a certain Silicon Valley investor casting AI (or more accurately anti-AI) sentiment in explicitly apocalyptic terms.
The point is, something (else) is happening in the Bay Area. The once proudly secular center of the country is suddenly engaging a whole lot more with serious moral reasoning and faith-based ideas on what it means to be uniquely human. Naturally, this is exactly the kind of territory that philosophers and theologians (that’s us) have spent centuries thinking carefully about. So we called up the New York Times and said ‘put us in, coach,’ and to our surprise and delight, they agreed.
Mark your calendars for June 10th, when Meghan Sullivan will join Renée DiResta at Hard Fork Live (more on what that is below), in conversation with Aarti Shahani, to dig into what philosophy and theology actually have to offer this moment - and why Silicon Valley is finally paying attention.
And to be clear, it’s not just the fringe or the provocateurs reaching for these frameworks. Anthropic is drawing on virtue ethics concepts laid out by Aristotle 2,400 years ago to develop Claude. The Pentagon is updating medieval just war theory to guide autonomous weapons development. And just last week, Pope Leo XIV released the first-ever papal encyclical on artificial intelligence.
Silicon Valley is reaching for these frameworks because the questions underneath AI -what are humans for? what do we owe each other? what should never be optimized? - are ones that these ancient traditions are well-poised to answer.
So, what we’re really trying to say is that philosophy and theology didn’t go anywhere. Their invitations to the party may have gotten lost in the mail for the better part of the last century….but we are so back. And we’re doing it LIVE! With Hard Fork in San Francisco on June 10th. We hope to see you there. (And if we don’t, you can watch a video of the panel and coverage of the event here shortly after. Subscribe below to stay tuned.)
A note on Hard Fork: For those who aren’t familiar, Hard Fork is a technology podcast produced by the New York Times and co-hosted by seasoned tech journalists, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. With a primary focus on AI, Kevin and Casey (+ guests) cover everything from technical developments, to societal impacts, to fringe cultural movements. And for the second year in a row, they’re bringing the podcast to the people with a live event in San Francisco, gathering technologists, journalists, and thinkers for a night of conversation about where AI and tech are headed next.