Philosopher and Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan shares her take on how the AI era has forced us to rethink what truly gives human life value. As machines surpass us in logic and productivity, the love ethic offers an answer rooted in dignity, connection, and care.
Similar to other technological advancements throughout history, this moment has created an opportunity for a philosophical breakthrough: one that helps us identify what humanity really is, how to identify it, and how to preserve it.
MEGHAN SULLIVAN: The dawn of the era of powerful artificial intelligence, which is upon us, is going to raise profound challenges for the Love Ethic and it's also going to be an incredible opportunity for the Love Ethic.
The Love Ethic says to love your neighbor with the same intensity with which you love yourself. It says that there is something incredibly important and unique about being a human person, about having human dignity, the way that humans think and behave, which has moral significance, which software will never have.
How are we going to explain the basis of that dignity, the basis of that significance, when we have software that is computationally far more powerful than we are? When we have software that's far better at reasoning than we are.
We are going to stop having any temptation, I think, to measure human dignity in terms of productivity or logical capacity or our ability to reason according to certain kinds of formal rules because software is now better at that than we are. We're going to have to locate dignity in something even more fundamental.
And proponents of the Love Ethic, I think, will emerge as some of the most powerful voices about what gives our lives value if it's not something that software can do.
Another area where the Love Ethic is going to become incredibly important is that we have noticed in the last 25 years, with the dawn of the internet era and the dawn of social media, that our technology has the capacity to make us really unloving, make us very insular, very lonely, very fractured.
And I think we have every reason to believe, as our technology becomes more ubiquitous and more powerful, that this trend is only going to continue.
I think the best hope that we have is with philosophy.
When we went from hand-written script to the printing press, when we went from local industries to the industrial revolution, these were also periods of incredible philosophical creativity.
When humans were forced to rethink maybe some lazy assumptions about what made our lives meaningful and what makes our society work. Those assumptions were challenged, and as a result of really leaning into the philosophical questions, we came up with even better ideas about why we're here, what fundamentally makes us human, and how we should rearrange our social lives.
I think the coming dawn of the era of powerful artificial intelligence is going to be another occasion like this, and it will be an amazing opportunity to see a big leap forward in our ethical thinking about love and about what it means to organize our society around fundamentally human ethical principles.
