Welcome to the DELTA
Navigating the great AI shift with the oldest technology we have
Brace for Impact…
December 2022. I’m sitting on my family’s couch in rural Virginia, working on a syllabus for my intro philosophy course, God and the Good Life. The assignments are all nudges designed to help students wrestle with the biggest question there is: what does it mean to be a good human being?
My younger brother is sitting next to me, on his phone, smirking. “You know you can’t teach this anymore, right?”
He pulls out his phone and opens an app that had just been released to the public: ChatGPT. He types in one of my philosophical prompts. Seconds later there is a thoughtful, heartfelt reflection written with perfect grammar. He tweaks it, and now the voice sounds just like a freshman. He gives it another tweak, adding spelling error. “Every philosophical exercise you could possibly cook up,” he says. “This AI does it. You’re going to have to change everything.”
That was my personal singularity.
You’ve probably heard of the technological singularity — the hypothetical moment when AI surpasses human intelligence and takes over the world. Your personal singularity is smaller and more unsettling: the moment AI takes over your world. The moment you realize the change isn’t coming. It’s here.
What does it mean to care for your soul if we now do all of our thinking with machines?
It turns out this isn’t a new question. Humans wondered about power, individual agency, and what makes our lives special for over two thousand years. And for much of that time, the institution that thought hardest about it was the Church.
For my colleague Adam, the personal singularity hit when he was driving his four children to school one day. South Bend had just had its first major snowfall of the year. He was corralling kids out the door when his oldest, age twelve, stopped and grabbed his father’s arm. “Look, Dad! All the snow– it’s so beautiful! It looks like AI made it!” Adam realized, with horror, that his children will grow up in a culture that thinks everything worthy of our awe comes from this technology. There’s no room left for the transcendent. And as a result, vanishingly little room left for our souls.
Religion is, among other things, ancient technology for being human. This starts from the conviction that there is something extraordinarily special about being a human. We have a value that has nothing to do with how productive, wealthy, or intelligent we are. But there are ways of life that befit our humanity. And ways of life that can degrade it. Faith traditions have a whole lot to offer as we think through what it means to put humans in all of their particularity and dignity at the center of the AI conversation.
The Human Delta is our attempt to bring that ancient technology to bear on the newest questions. Smart, a little nerdy, occasionally irreverent, always serious about the stakes.
The Framework
Every piece we publish is grounded in DELTA — an ethical framework that flows from our interests in philosophy, theology, and the inherent value of human lives. It stands for five interrelated principles:
D — Every person is valuable just because they are human—not because of how smart, wealthy, or productive they are. We should take this into account when using AI to increase scale, speed, or efficiency and ask how individuals are affected in each case.
E — Embodiment: We are physical, social, vulnerable people. Our lives and relationships happen through our bodies and within communities. While some uses of technology can improve health and reduce suffering, our mortality makes life precious. Our senses help us cherish what we encounter—virtual reality can never fully capture lived experience.
L — Love: We should care for others unconditionally, seeing them as they are and valuing what makes each person unique. Relationships of all kinds involve two-way exchanges, which give them meaning. Tools like chatbots might simulate companionship, but real, messy human connection is a fundamental need we all must fulfill.
T — Transcendence: Some things in this world are freely given and impossible to optimize or monetize with technology. Beauty and awe help us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves. As we increasingly use technology to interpret the world, we need to equally develop our love for the truth and nurture our spiritual lives.
A — Agency: To live a good life, people need freedom, focus, and the ability to make moral choices. Some of the technology we use can diminish these virtues. As agentic AI gains momentum, we need to identify and protect decisions that only a human conscience should make and prepare a new generation to take their moral responsibility seriously.
Rooted in Christian tradition, designed to be accessible to anyone. The framework offers us a positive vision of what it is to be fully human, some philosophical ballast for disorienting times. We also believe that this framework can help you grasp what’s actually at stake when a new AI product lands in your life, your school, your congregation, or your company. We’ll try to prove that with thoughtful articles, tips, and interviews that you can put to use right away.
Who Writes Here?
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. Philosopher. Ethics Initiative founder. The person whose brother ruined her philosophy syllabus in 2022 and inadvertently started all of this.
Adam Kronk is the Director of the DELTA Network. His doctorate focused on how organizations actually operationalize values — not just adopt them on paper. His career has taken him from homeless families to rural Cambodian teachers to C-suite executives at a publicly traded manufacturing company. He has four young children, a dearth of free time, and great taste in coffee.
Meg McDermott is the Director of the ND-IBM Tech Ethics Lab. With a background in anthropology and finance, and a previous career in global development, she brings a grounded perspective to questions about AI, human dignity, and what it means (and for whom) to build and use technology responsibly.
We’re joined by a rotating cast of educators, philosophers, theologians, pastors, technologists and others who spend their lives thinking about human formation and are now reckoning with what AI means for that work.
Who is in the DELTA Force?
The teacher trying to figure out what to tell students about ChatGPT. The pastor whose congregation is asking questions he doesn’t have answers to yet. The tech worker who grew up religious and finds the AI moment pulling old questions back to the surface. The kind of person who follows debates about AI and culture but is ready for some spiritual depth and sick of the usual culture wars. We believe there is a significant community of thoughtful folks who are ready for an approach to AI that puts human dignity and spiritual depth at the very foundation of these debates.
We briefly toyed with calling this community “The Deltas” before a colleague reminded us that was the name of the really dumb class of society in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (It also kind of sound like we are a frat.) We kind of like the name DELTA Force, which connotes a community committed to excellence and not afraid to push back in defense of humanity. Plus it just sounds a bit more… badass. The delta is also a fertile place where life grows. River deltas were frequently the places where civilizations sprouted in the ancient world. We believe there is still plenty of growth in store for humans even in this new era.
Whatever your starting point, you’ll leave with new insight about how to grow as a human, ready intellectually and spiritually to meet this moment.