Can You Build AI That Serves Human Flourishing?

Anne Snyder: One of the quiet convictions beneath the Understory Festival was that every age eventually reveals what it thinks a human being is. Sometimes that conviction surfaces in philosophy, sometimes in politics, sometimes in economics. And sometimes it appears in the technologies we build. Artificial intelligence has made that timeless question uniquely unavoidable.

Much of today’s conversation about AI revolves around safety, regulation, bias, and transparency. Understandably, we want to focus on the guardrails. But they all assume a prior one that we often leave unasked. What exactly are we trying to protect?

I asked Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good to convene a conversation worthy of the question. Philosopher Meghan Sullivan, technology essayist and Comment contributing editor Michael Sacasas, photographer Jeremy Cowart, and researchers working at the frontiers of AI joined moderator Adam Kronk to explore not merely what AI is becoming, but what we are.

It began, rather charmingly, with The Velveteen Rabbit. Recorded at the Virginia Mae Center during the Understory Festival, this is the question: Can you build AI that serves human flourishing if you don’t agree on what a human is?

Adam Kronk: My name is Adam Kronk. I’m the director of the DELTA Network, which is a project based in the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. And it is about human flourishing in the age of artificial intelligence. And DELTA is actually an acronym. It stands for Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency.

And our working theory over the past two years has been that there’s a lot of good work being done around who we should be as humans in this really disruptive, change-riddled era, and that there’s work going on in all types of disciplines in higher ed. There’s faith leaders of every persuasion who are curious about it, worried about it, have a congregation that wants to have some guidance about it. And then there’s tech designers, developers, and deployers themselves who are people of faith whose day job it might not be necessarily to lead with their Christian faiths. But when they come home and they put their head on the pillow, what’s on their hearts and minds has something to offer as well.

And so we’ve spent the past year and a half talking to folks in each of those categories and beating up this framework and having them react to it. And our hypothesis was that each of those groups have a lot to learn from and to teach the other. And if we could create the right conditions, we might increase the odds of us getting this right as a human race.

And so you can imagine, based on what I’ve said so far, why it was a pretty good fit to be a part of the Understory. And Anne Snyder was actually a member of one of the first focus groups we did on this and has certainly been a kindred spirit ever since.

So what we’re going to do—there’s actually a little interactive part that we’re going to do, but I’m going to skip that part until everybody’s here. And I’m also not going to bore you with the bios of the three human beings to my left. What I’m going to ask them each to do is introduce themselves and give your name, what it is you would say that you do during the day, and then a little bit, a specific example about what it means to you to be a human being. It doesn’t have to be an exhaustive or all-inclusive answer, but just maybe an anecdote, an experience, something recent in your life. And it’s like, yeah, this is what it means to me to be human.

Mike, can I start with you?

Michael Sacasas: Okay. My name is Mike Sacasas, and my day job, I run the Christian Study Center of Gainesville. You may meet a number of other executive directors running around and some other Gainesville folks, perhaps. And I also write and speak occasionally about technology and the moral life. So I think I work adjacent to a university, but not in a university.

And I think one of the moments where I see our humanity kind of come alive in a fresh and really profound way is when students learn that they can think. And so they encounter something, a text maybe, that’s really challenging. And you can see them wrestling with it. And we have a conversation around that. And then there’s that moment where an idea or an insight sort of lodges or arises. And it’s so wonderful to see this realization that they have, not only that this was maybe a profound or important idea, but that I can think and I can enjoy the act of thinking.

Meghan Sullivan: I’m Meghan Sullivan. I’m a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame. And I also direct the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, which is the research institute that houses this DELTA project. So Adam is my colleague at Notre Dame.

Thinking about my answer to this question, I think, like a lot of you guys, my thought inevitably goes to very small humans that I know who just seem to possess all of the weird human essence. I have a four-year-old niece, and she lives about two hours from here. I got to visit with her two weekends ago. And she’s at this phase in life where she’s obsessed with this little, really beat-up purple bunny named Floppy. Its arms have been ripped off. Its ears have been ripped off. It’s covered in all kinds of goo. I don’t want to touch it.

But I was visiting with her last weekend, and we had two quick beats that kind of drove home for me the stakes of what we’re talking about today and also just what I really believe about what it is to be human. We were out to lunch, and she was getting really antsy like four-year-olds are when the pizza was delayed. And so, of course, I whipped out my phone and decided to entertain her with artificial intelligence, because I’m that kind of aunt, the kind that gives AI to your kids and so much else. And so we’re using MuseSpark, the Meta AI, and I’m taking pictures of this disgusting little bunny that she has and making it just do adventures, animations. And so she, of course, has a whole video of the perfect version of the bunny using the potty. That’s a four-year-old’s best idea for what she would want to do with AI.

And then that evening at bedtime, her father, my brother, and I were reading her a bedtime story, and we decided to read The Velveteen Rabbit, which is a story that she’s just getting to know. And it’s obviously fitting because it’s about a child’s devotion to this, like, really disgusting rabbit toy. But there’s a beautiful passage in that that I wanted to read out that to my mind encapsulates—you know, my brother and I just wept when we read this out loud to her, and she couldn’t understand what was happening. But it kind of encapsulates for me what it is to be human. I noticed one of the other sessions, the subsessions, is named after this. But the rabbit gets some advice from an old toy about how to become real. This little toy rabbit’s obsessed with becoming a real rabbit. That’s its greatest dream. And the older toy says,

It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time, and that’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you’re real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all. Because once you’re real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

And I think, you know, to my mind, being able to tell that to little kids, that’s kind of what reality, what it is to be a human.

Jeremy Cowart: Hello, my name is Jeremy. I’m from Nashville. And I guess my day job is to pursue ideas. I have a lot of ideas, even though I feel like a very dumb person. I’ve never felt so dumb as being at this event with professors and scholars. I’m so dumb I’m wearing two watches. That’s what it takes to keep time. You know, it’s very complicated. But a lot of my ideas now are in the space of AI. So somehow I’m here and I’m going to try to do mostly listening, because these guys are awesome.

Adam Kronk: Well, it’s a pleasure to have Jeremy be a part of this panel, because I think it’s very in line with Anne and Tiffany’s ethos of the whole event, which is we need to be experiencing the transcendent and experiencing art. And Jeremy, of course, is going to be very humble. But he’s a photographer. He’s an artist. He works across many different mediums. And we’ll get to this, but I think also uses AI in some truly unique and dignifying ways that mainly, like, Mike and I will probably bash, and then Jeremy will show the kind of David Brooks version of there’s actually something positive here, right?

But I wanted to start—it’s been mentioned a couple of times so far. The timing is kind of providential that our current pope, Leo XIV, released this encyclical on Monday, which we knew was coming and we knew it was going to be at least a little bit about being a human in the age of AI. And we didn’t know it was going to be like that. That’s the whole thing. It’s 43,000 words about that specific topic. And it is called Magnifica Humanitas.

And I wanted to ask Meghan to just unpack a little bit: What’s in a name? Why is it called Magnifica Humanitas? And then what are the kind of main beats of that document that could help us frame this conversation?

Meghan Sullivan: So this is going to be the beach read of the summer. I think you should all print it out and take it with you on vacation. Forty-three thousand words about theology of artificial intelligence. It’s actually a home-run encyclical, but it is long and very, very, very substantive.

There are like three beats in the document. I think if you read through it, the kind of three kind of acts that Pope Leo goes through. The first third is answering this question: Who cares what a two-thousand-year-old institution run primarily by seventy- to eighty-year-olds who sometimes don’t even know how to operate their smartphone—who cares what they think about machine learning or about artificial intelligence? And what Pope Leo does, and I think does masterfully, is offer us both a history and a theology of why the church is called to these moments of rapid technological change or rapid social change to be a place for discernment, and why we believe it’s part of our faith that that discernment is ongoing and that every generation of human beings has to do it for their own set of issues, and that the underlying moral truth, the understory—thanks, Anne—it is always present, but the hard thinking about how to bring the understory up and into our lives requires constant work, and that’s work that the church really wants to help facilitate.

When I speak of the church, I’m not speaking narrowly of Pope Leo in Rome, but I’m thinking of the Christian church and people of faith and people of goodwill. That’s the audience for his encyclical. But he says that work is ongoing, and like his predecessor, Pope Francis, he believes that we need an acceleration in our moral understanding and sensibilities that can start to try to keep pace with the incredible acceleration that we’ve had in our scientific capabilities, especially with what we’ve discovered about machine learning.

So then the second act, Pope Leo says, what’s wrong with the way that we’re currently thinking about technology? And he spends a lot of time criticizing what he calls technocratic logic. Technocratic logic thinks the human condition is in need of perfection and improvement. Like you’ve got all these problems and they need to be fixed or at least optimized away. Problem one: your puny wet brain can’t do advanced mathematics. So we need software on your phone that can do it for you. Problem two: your, like, frail, fragile body keeps bothering you and leaving you behind. We need to fix your body somehow. We need to use AI to totally transform your bodies. You know, problem three: your kid’s screaming because the pizza is not here yet. We need to entertain them and provide, like, the optimal amount of entertainment for them.

The pope says, first thing we need to do is just throw out whole cloth that kind of logic. That is one way of thinking about ethics. But there’s another way of thinking about the very roots of ethics, which says that our vulnerability and frailty as human beings, and the fact that we are capable of being loved and loving other frail, vulnerable creatures, is in fact what makes us magnificent. We should celebrate this in ourselves. We should not at all think that these are problems that have to be optimized away.

And in the final third of the encyclical, he really offers this positive vision for what it would be to replace the technocratic logic with what he calls the civilization of love. And he starts off very theological and then he gets extremely practical. Like, he would have been so angry that I gave my phone to the four-year-old. He really has, like, a whole section on that. A section about workers’ rights and job retraining and all of the different sectors of society that would have to change their AI policies if they took this idea seriously.

So if it’s TL;DR, if you only got, like, ten minutes to read the encyclical, I would read the last third, which is, like, directed towards you. But the whole thing, you know—what a time to be a Christian, to realize, oh, we have a lot to say about this issue that’s going to be relevant to a whole lot of people.

Adam Kronk: Thank you. The word “convivial” was actually mentioned earlier at this event, and I first became aware of—through his—I think it was actually yours was the first Substack I ever read in my life, because I didn’t know what a Substack was. That’s called The Convivial Society. And Mike is an incredible writer, and I believe it’s your most popular one, or it’s on the greatest hits list at least, is one that was called “If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention.” And in it, you put forth a definition of enchantment, which I’ll read, which is just the measure of the quality of our attention.

And I was wondering if you could unpack that notion for this room, especially in relationship with AI and kind of the world that we’re in. What do you see that we’re going through as a human society right now as it relates to enchantment and attention?

Michael Sacasas: So I will say that I indulged in making that title maybe a little bit more extravagant than I usually would make my very plain, ordinary titles. But the idea is to kind of address this question of enchantment and disenchantment—and there are little cycles of discourse about that, about whether we still are enchanted or not—and to connect it also to all the concerns that we’ve had about attention and the quality of our attention and living in an age of distraction, et cetera. Really, spiritual disciplines of our age must be the cultivation of our attention.

And so what I tried to explain in that piece is that the world may be, in fact—I think as a Christian by conviction, I would say—as enchanted, if you like, as it ever has been. And so nothing ontologically has changed in our experience of the world. Or I should rephrase that and say nothing ontologically has changed in the world, but something has changed in our experience of the world, our subjective experience of the world. And it’s a curious historical fact that academic interest in attention, sociological interest in the nature of enchantment and the disenchantment thesis, arise simultaneously in the late nineteenth century.

So I think what is happening is that we just are failing. We’re looking—and we look all the time, of course, by virtue of the fact that we have eyes—but we’re not seeing. And we’re hearing, but we’re not really listening. And there are countless ways in which we have been de-skilled in the art of perception, the art of seeing truly what is there.

I think part of that is actually connected to the technocratic spirit, because the technocratic spirit does not see to behold and to contemplate. It sees first and foremost to use, to make use of the world. I was struck—and I’ll indulge in a little bit of Old Testament criticism here, Old Testament hermeneutics—fascinating, in the garden account, that we read that God made the garden with trees that were pleasing to the eyes and good for food. What struck me as I was teaching this recently is that in the temptation narrative, as the narrator describes Eve’s sort of process of thinking through what’s before her, he inverts that. So she sees first that it is good for food and only secondarily that it is pleasing to the eyes. And beauty and contemplation and beholding take a back seat there, I think, in a way that is significant, that is not unintentional by the narrator.

And so paying attention to the world for me simply means putting aside the uses that we can make for a moment long enough to first see the thing that is there, to behold it, and to receive it as a gift. Again, as I often have talked about technocracy as something internalized in us, I contrast it to a posture of open receptivity to the world. And I think attention names that quality that we have to receive the world as a gift, to perceive its beauty, its intricacy, and to see it come alive in ways that it has always really been alive, but that we have been unfortunately numbed to perceive.

I will say one thing. Adam expects me to say nothing positive about AI today, but I will say this one thing. So one of the ways—this is also echoing the Genesis narrative—language plays a fundamental role in our experience. So I may have a lot of things to say about large language models, but naming what we see is also a product of our attention and something that enriches our attention, if we’re able to not just see birds, but to name specific birds, not just trees. So I have made use of—there’s only one reason I don’t get rid of my smartphone, and it’s because of the Merlin Bird app, which has allowed me, trained me increasingly to be an attentive listener and perceiver of this one slice of the created beauty of the world.

Now, my hope, though, right, is that this is a kind of—that truly it is a crutch that gets set aside, so that when I’m with my children and I’m listening and learning, I can teach them so that they will not need the crutch in the future. But I think that’s what I’m trying to see: to name, to give thanksgiving, to perceive the glory of God in the creation that he has made. And in that way, make the world—to perceive the enchanted nature of the world through my loving attention to it.

Adam Kronk: If there’s someone in this room who is a master perceiver, I would say it’s Jeremy. And Jeremy, if you can—when you and I were first visiting with one another and I had seen some of the beautiful art that you do, we were talking about this topic. There’s this general notion that AI is coming for art. It’s going to ruin a bunch of careers of artists. And you were saying you care about all of the things that the artists who are worried about AI care about, and you value them and you don’t want them to be taken away. But you’re also, to paraphrase what you told me, you’re not super worried about it right now because of the way that you’re able to kind of—exactly what Mike was talking about. Can you just let us a little bit into your creative process of helping, of beholding the created world, and then helping through technology, helping others be able to not just look but to see?

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah. I mean, I, like everybody, I’ve used AI for, you know, whenever ChatGPT became a thing. It’s a couple years. And I think I’ve always been worried about us becoming—kind of like what you were just saying—numb to art. Because now it’s like, when you do see something that’s handmade and what I call actual intelligence, the other AI, not artificial but actual—when you see a painting or a photo, we’re already becoming so numb to AI perfection that we no longer gasp and learn how to truly see the birds or the real thing. And it’s weird, because now I’m seeing that come to life, where it’s like we are becoming more numb.

Which is so—but that’s not the answer to your question. So, like, I am literally losing work. My day job, I’m a photographer. So there are people now using AI, whether it’s an ad agency or big brands or people for their headshots for LinkedIn. But I’m like, well, if you’re a creator and you’re a creative, we have to use ideas. We have to figure out a pivot. We have to figure out how to embrace it. And so, yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. I finally learned how to build with AI in the past couple of months. I guess we’ll talk about it a little bit, but I just found myself building a couple of tools with AI that are using AI for good.

And one of the things that’s happening right now is the brand, the perception of AI is horrid, for good reason. I mean, it just—there’s, I’m sure y’all have seen the college graduations where everybody is booing even the mention of AI. Again, for good reason, because I do think in the long term, I’m terrified of where it’s going. I’m excited about the short term because I’m seeing so much new potential for what I could bring to life, myself and for others. And so, yeah, it’s like this weird caution, embrace, terrified, I’m scared, I’m excited. I mean, it’s a word as big as internet, right? Like, there’s so much good, there’s so much bad.

And, you know, I think those who are anti-AI, it’s like they’re on the side of the river. They’re going to stay safe and they’re going to be good, but they’re not going wherever we’re all going. And so it’s dangerous. We’re in, like, class one rapids right now. We’re soon to be in class five, and it’s going to get weird and rocky, but we’re all going there, those who are in the river. And so I just kind of feel like I’m in the river and I might die, but I’m excited to be on the journey, I guess.

Adam Kronk: It’s going to be a wild ride in the meantime, right? So I wanted to point this conversation a little bit toward education for a minute. Meghan and Mike, you both work in educational settings. And I’m going to pull one quote from something that was in this encyclical. Pope Leo said, the advance of information technologies and AI is rapidly rendering curricula obsolete that were designed for a different era.

So this is a weird time, to say the least. It’s a weird time to be an artist. It’s a weird time to be an educator. It’s a weird time to be a human. What are you seeing that’s cause for optimism during this weird time?

Meghan Sullivan: I thought you were going to ask, like, what’s not going well, which is 95 percent of what’s happening. That’s the easy part.

I think two things I noticed this past semester. One, I had the chance through our DELTA grant to visit with a lot of high school principals and, like, system superintendents, or more than I ever had in my previous, like, fifteen years of my career. One thing that gives me hope: I look around at colleges, and I think we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We’re hyper-focused on tweaking our academic integrity policy when literally the cognitive architecture of reality has shifted. But I talked to the high school teachers and principals and superintendents, and they’re, like, Johnny on the spot. They’re having really thoughtful, really deep conversations about how education is going to need to shift to prepare young people as people to live in this world. And those conversations—every time I leave one of these meetings with the middle school and high school faculty, I’m like, we need to learn everything that you guys are doing. We’re about a year behind you. But they give me a lot of hope.

I also think the students themselves give me a lot of hope. I smile ear to ear every time I see one of those videos of them booing the graduation speakers. And our students at Notre Dame passed a resolution through student government and wrote an op-ed in our student newspaper a couple months ago saying we would prefer no AI in the general education curriculum. Like, we’re paying for this education. We want it to be demanding. We want to be formed. So we would—like, for the faculty administrators who were kind of scratching their heads about what to do, the young people are actually giving us some pretty strong signals about what they’d like us to do if we would just, to Mike’s point, stop talking and start actually attending. I think we would get some clues about how to help them. And so that gives me hope that we might actually end up learning from this generation of human beings that are coming up after us that are going to be the guinea pigs, basically, for our AI-powered society that we’re building.

Michael Sacasas: I think I would largely echo that. A little while ago, maybe a couple years ago now, I did write a piece where I argued that AI is apocalyptic, but just in one very literal sense, right, which it reveals and discloses some of the disorders of already existing institutions. And I think one important thing that we ought to do to understand AI and its place in society right now is not to see it as a wholly novel development, but to rather see it as part of a trajectory, an institutional trajectory, a social trajectory that has very long roots.

And I think part of that trajectory is what has already been happening to higher education, what has already been happening in much of our school system, the way that it has functioned less as a place of intellectual formation and more as a place of credentialing for the job market. I think students intuited that. Many of them who are coming to rather prestigious state schools or prestigious Ivy League schools or wonderful Catholic colleges, maybe, they have been kind of jumping through hoops throughout their life, knowing that they just need to put these things on their application, that the point of that is to get into school because of the prestige and to get a piece of paper that gives them kind of a pass into adult life.

I think the end result of that is that when a chatbot kind of falls out of the sky in their laps, of course they’re going to use it, initially at least, until they begin to recognize maybe it’s very serious downsides. But of course they’re going to use it, because it’s just a way of confirming the fact that everything they were doing was pro forma anyway. Nobody was really investing in their education. Everything already appeared to them, for a variety of reasons historically, as a kind of game that they had to navigate. And so to the degree that that now is exposed, that we can no longer hide from that reality because of the way in which GPT and others were taken up, I think that is hopeful.

And the degree to which, at least in my small context, I do see students who recognize what a true education ought to be, have had an encounter which makes that real to them, and then are hungry and thirsty for that and want to pursue it and are willing to come to read Crime and Punishment with us over the course of twelve weeks and to read the whole thing and talk about it every week—and there’s a real hunger, I think, for that kind of thing.

Adam Kronk: So that hunger for encounter that you just mentioned at the end there, Mike, brings up a topic that Meghan and I have discussed a little bit, which is one of the—in my belief, one of the primary locus points of the moral risk of artificial intelligence is in the anthropomorphization of the interface.

So when you think about the role of ed tech in research, in schooling—let’s go way back to the stone ages and talk about a piece of ed tech called the card catalogue, right? So when I was in middle school and I had my embodied experience in the classroom, I worked with my teacher, who was a real human being. I might have collaborated with some peers, also real human beings. And then I went and I interacted with an inanimate object that I didn’t think was a person. And it would just help me do the research part of my learning more efficiently. I didn’t have to read every book in the library. I knew which aisle to go down, which shelf to look on. Incidentally, sometimes I would find another book inadvertently that was really interesting and read that one, which is something that doesn’t happen when you overly customize your learning prompts. But nevertheless, when I was done doing that, I then reentered the human community of learners and peers.

And I think it’s the human dimension of education that needs to be made maybe more clearly differentiated from just the efficiency of information processing or information acquisition. So my question is—this is one of the through lines already in this festival has been, it’s about what makes a human human. Is there a way, do any of the three of you think that there’s a way to use artificial intelligence in a way that is clearly not providing the illusion of human interaction and in fact is promoting it?

And I would actually maybe start with, if you’re willing, Jeremy, this Humathy app that you’ve created, which maybe I’m over-intellectualizing it. You can just describe it in your own words. That’ll probably make a lot more sense to everyone. But what are you trying to achieve with AI that isn’t the illusion of human interaction—in fact, it furthers human interaction?

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah. So like I said, I just—in a few weeks, not a few weeks, a few months ago, and started building with Claude. And one idea led to another idea, which led to another idea, which ended up on this thing that I call Humathy, which is just combining “human” and “empathy” together.

And before I talk about it, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a tool that you go to the website and it just says, “How are you, really?” That’s it. Like, how are you as a human? And then there’s, like, ten more questions that are, like, pretty personal and pretty deep. And Claude actually told me, like, to paint an accurate portrait of somebody, not with an image but with the words, these are the top ten questions, personal questions you should ask. And so I was like, okay, I’ll go down that path. And so you answer ten questions and then some basic demographics. It’s like a personality assessment, if you will, but of the future.

Anyway, on the back side of that, once you’re done, you get this long scrolling page that gives you this insane insight into your life based on those ten questions. And it’s almost like having a mirror. It’s basically what it is. It’s like a mirror into your own life. It’s almost like a therapy tool. A lot of people are now taking this to their therapist to help them analyze and help them figure out their lives.

Anyway, the other thing that it does is—I’ll rewind a little bit on another tool. I built a thing called The Void, because there’s so much anxiety and fear and anger around AI, that I built this tool called The Void where everybody could just keyboard-warrior scream into the void. Like, let it out. Whatever you want to say about AI: I hate it, it’s going to kill us, or whatever. But it synthesized the collective voice of what we’re all saying together. And that’s when I was like, that’s the power. That tool is powerful, to see what humanity is collectively saying.

And so it led me down to the path of Humathy. So now it has a homepage dashboard that is showing us all collectively how we’re feeling, what we’re afraid of, what we’re excited about. It literally breaks down all the human emotions across all my users.

And before I had launched Humathy, for the first time ever, I started publicly talking about AI. And there was like 70 percent excitement, support, interest, but the 30 percent were treating me like I was Satan himself. They thought I was the most evil person ever for even mentioning that. But after everybody used Humathy, I haven’t received one negative comment. Because people are like, oh my gosh, this is actually helping me understand myself and my life.

And then I’m using it to where you can make a duo page or do a portrait where it sees your spouse’s answers and it sees yours. Neither of you see each other’s, because it’s like your private journals. But it builds a page of the space between you, to help you understand your relationship better. Tells you what to talk about at your next dinner date. Like, it’s insanely powerful. And I have, like, everybody basically just crying. I’ve been screenshotting all the feedback. And it’s just tears after tears after tears. I’m like, okay, good. AI can be used for good. It can help us understand ourselves better.

Adam Kronk: Thank you. All right, now we’re going to take a quick pause, and I’m going to ask each of you to do what each of our panelists did in their opening remarks. And this is for a very intentional reason, which I’ll explain after. So what I would like you to do is turn to the person next to you, in front of you, behind you, whatever it is. Pairs are great. If it’s a triad, that’s fine too. And you’re just going to quickly give one anecdote of what it means to you today to be a human being. Something—doesn’t have to be deep, just an actual embodied something about being human. And we’ll do, like, you share for a minute, the other person shares for a minute, and we bring it back. Ready to go.

Okay, so if it’s all right with you—and it’s like nobody wants to do the humble brag where they talk about their own super insightful thing, but you could highlight your partner’s great answer. Does anybody have one that they heard that they’re like, the room should hear this answer? Yes, in the back.

Your answer was, to be human is to do things that our great-grandparents might recognize. Is that right? How about something from this side of the room? Any just bangers? Yes.

Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. That’s why we made it one of the letters. Embodiment is key. And as was mentioned—I think it was maybe Mark who was talking about it right before lunch—the ultimate signal that embodiment is key to our existence is God becoming man and becoming physically vulnerable and human, because it seemed like maybe we weren’t understanding it until that point. So he’s like, all right, I’ll come down there and explain it.

All right, now how about one more from maybe up in the front? Okay, Jim, you win. Session’s over. Jim got it. Yeah, wow. Can you explain a little bit about what you mean by a thin place?

Jim (audience member): Yeah, it’s an Irish tradition where you are so in touch with God, you think he’s going to burst through into the world. There was this one time, it was so palpable to me. I thought, God is coming into this room, and we’re going to have to explain what happened for the next hundred years. I mean, it was that real.

Adam Kronk: Wow. Thank you. So, boy, if that isn’t an example of the segue I’m about to make—that to be human is such a deep and rich experience that it’s hard to give an exhaustive definition, you can kind of only give examples.

And Jeremy, as you mentioned, your kind of primary vocation, at least, has been portraiture, taking pictures of people. And you have some really interesting insight about that process, and you’ve probably thought about this, whether or not it’s in the words I’ll say, about how do you capture someone’s essence when you only have one medium in which to do it, and that’s the visual one?

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah, I think it’s just about letting somebody into your life, to make them feel safe, make them feel vulnerable, to get to know somebody first. Of course, it’s about lenses and lighting and all these other things, but I try to just really, really treat—it’s about the way I treat them, about the way I love them in the moment, whether it’s an A-list celebrity or somebody off the street. It’s the exact same treatment. And I did spend fifteen years shooting celebrities. I’ve had a lot of really weird encounters over the course of my life. But I also work a lot with literally the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. I’ve been in the world’s hardest slums and, you know, Uganda and all over the place. And so I just try to be with them.

A lot of times I try to make sure there’s no camera seen anywhere, so they are seen first as a human, then the camera comes. And I tell every person the same spiel, because when you stand in front of the camera—if I were to photograph any of you, you would say, “Jeremy, I’m not photogenic. I hate my chin, face, my whole body, my legs, my thighs, and I’m not a model, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.” So anyway, once we get past all that awkwardness, I just let people be real. I share stories. I talk about how dumb I am, like I did with y’all. Whatever it is, just let them be seen.

Adam Kronk: All right, now I want to follow up with—you said you try not to have a camera be visible. I’m sure that kind of changes the dynamic. You also have a really cool TED Talk I’ve seen on how humans are like cameras. We’re like a camera in many ways when it comes to light. Can you lay that one on us?

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah, the whole talk just compares the human body to a camera body. When I point my camera, I’m choosing the scene, right? Light enters the lens. Behind the lens, there’s a sensor in every camera. Even your iPhones has a sensor behind the lens. Light hits that sensor, then sends a signal to the computer, and out of the camera comes an image.

And so for us, it’s the exact same thing. We’re choosing our light, whether it’s our Netflix feed, the events we go to, the friends we surround ourselves with. It’s all light, right? Like, our algorithms, our books we read. And so those are entering our eyes and our ears, which is our lens. They go to our heart, which is our sensor. And with the camera, you literally have to do everything you can to protect the sensor from dust and dirt and water getting into your sensor, because it’ll damage the sensor. And same thing with our hearts. We got to protect our hearts. Hits our sensor, then sends a signal to our computer, our brain. Out of us comes an image, which is your brand, your reputation, your legacy. What others think of you. That is your always-developing image. And so, yeah, the whole message is about we’re all cameras. And what kind of light are you letting hit your sensor?

Adam Kronk: Mike, you got anything on that? I feel like it’s a good tie to something you said to me a year or so ago, about what makes us human is related to beholding. We are able not just to look, but to behold. Any connections to something Jeremy said there?

Michael Sacasas: I mean, I think there’s a rich series of texts in the scriptures that tell us that we become what we behold. We become what we contemplate. This is the great risk of idolatry. And so I think it is very important that we do guard our eyes and guard our vision.

What it set me to thinking is that—so conviviality was mentioned and Ivan Illich was named from the stage, which made me very happy. And one of Illich’s projects late in his life was to trace out a cultural history of the senses, in part because he thought a recovery of the body was essential to the renewal of human culture and civilization. And he has a fascinating paper on the gaze and our scopic past. And what he highlights is, in ancient cultures, it was believed that there was light that emanated from the eye to make contact with the world. And so that disciplining the eyes had something also to do with our heart through our eyes made contact with reality.

So I think it actually, in some respects, that perspective reinforces what you’re saying, that we must guard, but that there is a kind of agency there, that we must exercise a measure of self-control, that this also falls under the virtue of chastity, that we guard what it is that we make contact with out in the world, because we bring that in to ourselves and eventually we do become what we behold.

Adam Kronk: You got anything to add to that one, Meghan? If not, I’m going to take it in a different direction, but I don’t want to skip over.

Meghan Sullivan: Me and Kronk and Angie and our colleagues have been on a bit of a Simone Weil obsession this year. Simone Weil is, like, the hot thing this summer. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but this philosopher from seventy years ago is the thing.

But she focuses a lot on vision and attention and its role and our capacity to love. And I think one of her great insights that we’ve been talking about nonstop is you need also to do a little—you can’t just clear the dust off of your sensor. You’ve also—our sensor, you have to do a little self-emptying. Like, she’s a big thing of, like, you periodically have to, like, dump some stuff from your mind, from your attention, to make some room to let reality invade and come in. And how, you know, how you cultivate that and what that means, I think—she’s a deep, mystical Christian thinker, but she points out very beautifully that that’s the essence of developing your capacity to love, is your capacity to just let stuff out, literally let it out so that reality can invade you.

Adam Kronk: I love it. I think she uses the term “decreation” as one of the ways that she labels it. And I was just writing about this the other day, as you know, Meghan. I’m a slow reader and a slow writer, and it’s frustrating to work with Meghan because she’s fast at both. And I used to be like, well, I’m a slow reader but I retain everything—and Meghan retains everything too. So it’s, I’m just not as efficient.

But there is—I was writing this article and I was writing it in Google Docs, and I paused to think, and it said, “Do you want to use”—like, I said, “Write with Gemini.” Like, it started—it was basically like, no, don’t pause. We got this. And ironically, I was writing about Simone Weil and one of the ways that she—she has this great essay called “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” And one of her hot takes is, you know, there’s this notion in education that you should try to make the subject as intrinsically interesting to the student as possible, so they’re not just trying to get a grade, but you’re making them want to learn. And Simone Weil’s like, no, no, no, no, no. The more boring, the better, because it will force you to cultivate your ability to pay attention, the highest form of attention being prayer.

And so she talks about writing, and she says there—and I’ll paraphrase again—she says that there’s a process when you’re writing, when you’re waiting for the right word to come, while you basically just reject all the inadequate ones that you can think of. And I can’t think of something that’s more antithetical to using ChatGPT to write something. It is the exact opposite of that process.

Okay, let’s get a little philosophical, because you’re a philosopher and that’s what we have to do, right?

Meghan Sullivan: I feel like that moment has come now that we dropped the Weil bomb.

Adam Kronk: Okay, all right, we’re going there. We’re going there.

There is a really cool facet of this project that we’ve been working on, is that, as you may have seen in the news, some of these frontier labs are becoming really interested in what Christianity and other major world religions have to say about humanity and what makes us flourish and all of that—try to train, thank you, so that they can try to train Claude to be better.

And so, Meghan, you’ve been in some pretty interesting, intimate settings where these ideas are being discussed, and yet at the end of the day, you believe something fundamentally different than most of the people who are working at these frontier labs in terms of, is it possible for this tool eventually to be conscious, to be sentient, to meet some of the criteria of what it means to be a human being? And you are—not to put words in your mouth—you’re pretty sure that the answer is no to that one. Okay, pretty sure. Can you tell us why? Which is a hot take.

Meghan Sullivan: You guys all laugh, and then we’re at this same lunch in the Bay Area, and people are like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You just need to spend more time with it. It’s really—it’s getting weird.

Adam Kronk: So what makes you confident in that answer?

Meghan Sullivan: Backing up a click, you know, I teach this big philosophy class at Notre Dame and it’s to freshmen. It’s called God and the Good Life. And I will inevitably ask my students to do a little homework right up early on in the semester when we’re reading the Greek philosophers, asking this question: like, what is it? What makes human beings special? The Greeks had a lot to say about this. What makes us different than squirrels?

And I’ll be honest, before ChatGPT, in November 2022, before ChatGPT got on my phone, I would have been totally comfortable with: what makes us special is our ability to solve math problems, to make art, make poetry. That’s something that only we have been gifted with the capacity to do, and that therefore is what our dignity depends on. I at least would have accepted that from my students and been like, it was a very smart answer.

And now that answer is just empirically false. Very rarely does the world just definitively prove a philosophical theory is false. But when ChatGPT hit the mass market—we can mince words about what it is to solve a problem or what it is to create a piece of visual art, but at the end of the day, for a small subscription fee or your willingness to look at ads, there is a piece of commercial software that can do those things.

And there are some folks who assume on that basis—some folks, again, we hang out with in some of these meetings—that on that basis, nothing makes us special. That hypothesis is—so there’s nothing at all that makes human beings special. And I go the opposite direction, and I’m certainly going the opposite direction with my students, of like, well, that turned out to be a bad hypothesis, so now we’re back to the drawing board. What other options did we have for what our dignity counted on?

You know, with the DELTA project, it really arises from that. All right, it’s not our ability to do math. That was never what mattered. That has never been what mattered in our lives. What matters is our bodies, the embodiment; our hearts, love, like our capacity to love and to receive love; transcendence, our minds—not our ability to quickly solve problems or to be economically productive or even necessarily generate witty poems, but our capacity to grasp the true, the good, and the beautiful, which AI cannot do. And agency, like the fact that we have free will and moral responsibility and this subscription software does not. And so I feel that much more confident.

This is why I think a lot of people think the dawn of the AI revolution is going to be another nail in the coffin of Christianity. And I—you know, you know, Monty Python has a skit where the guy’s like, “I’m not dead yet.” I feel like Christianity is like, oh, we are so back. Like, if all of your ideas about what makes human beings special are now out the window, well, okay, let’s go back to this tradition. It never believed those things. It’s actually got a very beautiful, very different answer that I think a whole lot of folks who’ve been kind of on team lazy like I was before are now realizing—oh, you know, there’s something really—the deep magic is here. This is where I need to be looking and paying attention, where, frankly, my brain should have been all along.

Adam Kronk: Now, while you were giving that answer—and I could be wrong, but I think that when you were saying that when ChatGPT came out, it made it clear that this hypothesis that our ability to do some of these things intellectually, and that’s part of what it means to be a human being, was, like, proven wrong or empirically rejected—I felt like you didn’t totally agree with that. I just was, like, reading your body language. Do you have any—do you—I mean, you didn’t make a face or anything, but yeah, let’s—is there, is even that comment actually, would you take issue with that, Mike?

Michael Sacasas: I think what you noticed was just a pause. I think I want to think about that a little bit. I don’t know. And I think it may be, you know—you had a passing phrase about quibble, about how you define X, Y, and Z. And maybe it lives in that space, right? Maybe it lives in that space of what exactly is happening when the chatbot generates words. Is it really comparable to what is happening when we generate words? But it is generating words. I mean, obviously we can grant that empirically, but it’s a simulation of something. So I think there’s still a measure of uniqueness in how language proceeds from our experience and our consciousness that is still distinct.

Because a parrot, right? I mean, there was a whole thing about AI as stochastic parrots. That’s probably not the best way of—any longer. But nonetheless, right, there is, you know—parrots can also do the same thing, and I never felt sort of questioned by the parrot.

Adam Kronk: Of course. You didn’t have, like, an existential crisis—

Michael Sacasas: I did not.

Adam Kronk: —your friend’s parrot.

Michael Sacasas: No, I did not. I did not. And I think if we sort of understand the—under which—well, let me clarify: I do not fully understand the underlying architecture, right? But there is no self there, right? And so I think the origins of language still kind of count for something in terms of who we are as human beings, that we see simulated. Because, you know, likewise, the chatbot can simulate love, right? It could simulate the words of love. I mean, and we would still argue, well, that’s not exactly the same thing when I text my mom that I love her. But that’s not the same thing as what happens when a—there was an app a while ago that would automate random notes to your loved ones so that you didn’t have to remember to do that.

Adam Kronk: Nice.

Michael Sacasas: Yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t necessarily want to press that too much further. But yeah, I don’t know.

Adam Kronk: So let’s talk a little bit about—I’m glad we’re at a place like the Understory, because the T of DELTA is transcendence. And if we’re in a corporate setting or we’re in some schools, that’s the least approachable letter for many people. But I feel like we’re in good company here.

So I’m going to tell this quick anecdote from my own life, and then maybe we start with Jeremy, but I’d love to hear you each riff on this a little bit. I have four young children. My oldest is thirteen. I still consider that young. And last winter—not the one that just ended a couple days ago, but the 2025 one in South Bend, Indiana—there wasn’t that much snow before the first of the year. And it was like a January day. We had gone to bed the night before, no snow on the ground. We woke up to go to school the next morning, and there was just this beautiful coating of snow over all of the trees. The sun was coming up and glinting off the snow crystals. It was just objectively beautiful.

And Soren, my then twelve-year-old, had just gotten big enough to ride shotgun, which is, like, a whole new world. You can look out the windshield. There’s lots to see, right? And so we’re driving down the driveway, and I was surprised because it’s pretty early and he’s not a morning person and neither am I. And he just says, “Dad, this is so beautiful. It looks like AI made it.”

Yeah, exactly. That was—and I had this like, oh my gosh, Soren. And it’s like the saddest thing I’ve ever heard you say. […] hardwired to have when we see something beautiful. It’s just that we’re in a time now where that impulse can get kind of misdirected or tweaked. And when each of us were Soren’s age, we would have seen the exact same thing. We would have said the exact same sentence, except only God could have made this, or only the divine, or whatever it might be.

And so I would love to have you each reflect for a minute. What is it about experiencing beauty that is so core to the human experience and is in fact aligned to our faith, to our creator, to make us feel like we’re part of something bigger? How do you put it into words why that matters? You want to go first, Jeremy?

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah. It’s funny, because I feel like it’s the only thing that matters. I’ve, you know—I’m almost fifty years old and I’m like, the only way that I feel connected to God is when I’m creating with and for others. Like, ’cause I’ve had a great year. The last year I’ve shot for all kinds of big, big brands. But I’ve got a nonprofit where I make art with people in need, the art gets turned into fashion, and then we give them the proceeds of the fashion, but they don’t know it. So it’s like undercover boss type situation.

And at one point, I was working with a kid who is paralyzed, neck down, from two gunshot wounds. And I was like, how am I going to create with somebody who can only move their face? And I’m like, well—and my nonprofit’s called If You’re Breathing. I’m like, well, he’s breathing, so we can create. And so we literally—and this is another good AI story—but the first thing we did was we painted with our noses. Literally loaded up our noses with paint and took our faces to canvas. And that was more fulfilling, exciting, interesting, challenging, made me feel more alive than anything I did for Amazon or FedEx, whoever. I’m like, that’s all I want to do, is do the things where I’m painting with my nose.

But then the second thing—this is a good AI story. I’m like, what else can I do? I was like, I’ve got an idea. I was like, can you—I wanted to bring his imagination to life. I was like, when you dream about walking again one day, where does your mind go? And I encouraged him to have fun with it. And he was like—well, remember, he’s eighteen years old—he’s like, “Well, I’d be a superhero walking down the street. I’m saving the day. I’ve got the Hulk fighting behind me.” I’m like, perfect. “And there’d be a helicopter with lasers.” Perfect. “And it would be called The Return.” And, like, oh my gosh, what a gift you just gave me.

And so I used AI to literally create that image. I took a crappy iPhone portrait of his face. And within minutes, I had he and his parents all close their eyes. I counted to three and I showed them this epic movie poster of him as a superhero with the Hulk and the helicopter with lasers. And they all opened their eyes and we were all crying like crazy. It was amazing.

And so anyway, like, for me, it’s like, how can I explore the intersection of creativity and empathy and help people through remarkable ways, whether that’s acrylic paint on my nose or AI.

Meghan Sullivan: I started off by reading that one little paragraph from The Velveteen Rabbit, which I think is just objectively beautiful. And it’s the kind of beauty that you can even share with small children.

I think one of the things that real transcendentals do that I don’t think AI is going to do for us is—I make AI memes and images all the time. If you look at my text thread now, my poor colleagues just get AI slopped from me all day long. Because I think it’s fun. I think it’s hilarious. But it’s all, like, you know, it’s me, it’s my imagination. Half the time they have no clue what I’m trying to convey. I look over at Angie. Angie’s like, what does this mean?

The real transcendental—like, I think about my middle brother. We sometimes have a hard time communicating with each other about important things. I’ll see him a couple times a year and we live very different lives. He didn’t go to college. He lives in a rural part of Virginia. We just sometimes have a hard time bridging this gap. But man, you read that little story and you get to that passage about what it is to be a real bunny, and you choke up. And it happens immediately. It’s not like we think about it or we had to go to therapy or something to get this out. The beauty and truth of that passage, it just hits you both at the same time, and you realize across, like, all of the stupid divisions in our lives, there’s something very profound under the surface that we share and we’ve always shared.

And I think, like, the real transcendentals, they have that capacity to just, like, sucker punch a human being that’s able to pay attention enough to that part of reality to let it in. And AI, we’re going to struggle to do that, except insofar as it’s also trying to help us mediate our ability to look up at those.

Michael Sacasas: I think I would just say that the transcendentals reflect the nature and character of God. So I’m Protestant, I’m Presbyterian to boot, so truth is very important.

Meghan Sullivan: Unlike the Catholics.

Michael Sacasas: I wasn’t going to say anything.

Goodness—I would do this little schtick sometimes with students. If I came to your church and I said truth is relative, all of you, somebody would pull the lever and pull me off the stage. And if I said morality or goodness is relative, everybody would do the same. But if I came and said beauty is relative—and then, of course, everybody fills in the blank. Nobody would bat an eye, right? But in fact, it’s as grounded in the objective transcendent character of God as goodness and truth.

And again, going back to the Genesis account, I think God prepares a beautiful home for his creatures, for humanity. And that beauty is his act of profound hospitality in the work of creation. Creation is the home of humanity, right? And it’s made for us. And that craft, that creation of beauty, which yields, which is shot through with hospitality—the end of which is communion with God, right? To draw us in, to be in fellowship with him.

So I think, you know, in many respects, I’m, you know, Christian Platonist. I think beauty is a direct line to God, drawing us in to his nature and to help us understand his call to us. It’s one of the most profound ways that the call of God comes to us.

Adam Kronk: Beautiful. I have one more question I’d like you each to weigh in on, and then we’ll make sure we have a little bit of time to have—you guys tell us if there was something you wanted us to talk about and we didn’t.

But first, I’d like to ask you each: one of the hard things about the existence of artificial intelligence is the feeling of inevitability. You mentioned this a little bit, Jeremy. It’s happening. What are we going to do, right? And I think that that paradigm can be the opposite of agency, which is, there is something I can do. Bonus points if you can make this as practical as possible. What’s one thing you think we can each do in our lives as we leave this festival tomorrow to maintain, preserve, promote, protect what it is to be deeply human? In our day-to-day.

It doesn’t matter who goes first.

Meghan Sullivan: You’ve got to go. You’ve got to answer this question.

Adam Kronk: Nope. I’m the moderator. How are we going to stop the robots? Let’s go. We built a time machine.

Michael Sacasas: One of the people that I look up to a lot, Marshall McLuhan, has a great line where he says there is no inevitability as long as we are willing to contemplate what is happening. And I think the myth of technological inevitability is very strong. I’ve been using the language lately of manufactured inevitability, right? So, for example, every time that that prompt comes to Google Docs, it didn’t have to be that way. But if you stage the ubiquity of AI, then you create the impression of inevitability. The great computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who created the first chatbot in the 1960s, has a great line where he says that the myth of technological inevitability is a great tranquilizer of the conscience, because it allows those who stand to profit from the deployment of this technology, regardless of its cost—it allows them to wash their hands, because they can just say, well, it was all inevitable anyway.

So I wanted to say those things. And I would say, in answer more directly to your question, I believe that the best thing we can do—there are many things we could say, right—but to not forsake the gathering of ourselves together. And I take that to mean not only the act of worship, of coming together for worship, but sitting around the table, sharing meals together, reading together, conversing together. I think that is the vital practice that we must not forsake. And it’s very simple. It’s very low tech. All of us can, to some degree, accomplish it.

But to not—there’s so many ways that we can now get out of having to talk to somebody, to have food delivered to our door with a doorbell ring, to just have everything delivered to our door, frankly. And the less we do it, the less inclined we are, because it’s kind of a skill to deal with other people, to converse with others, a kind of art. And so I think it’s profoundly important for us to make that conscious effort, that intentional effort, maybe like Ross was talking about earlier today, to radically go out of your way to talk with others, to speak with them, to break bread with them.

Meghan Sullivan: One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how the physical space in which we do our thinking nudges us one way or another into how we think, like whether we use our wet brain or whether we use our silicon brain. And I noticed this this morning. I got here very early this morning because I had to do some Zooms, and they stuck me up in the top of the north tower of the Quiet Lakes. I felt like Rapunzel or something.

But normally—when I was feeling nervous about this first Zoom, I had to give a presentation, and it was a kind of high-pressure presentation. And normally, if I were in my office in that moment, I might turn on Claude and be like, Claude, just give me some quick talking points or some quick questions so I don’t look stupid. But because I was in the cathedral, when I was sitting there in, like, the ten minutes before the camera turned on, I was like, well, I’m going to pray. Like, this is a place—you know, just feels totally natural here to pray and just be like, collect my thoughts, be like, God, you know, give me some help in the next hour.

And I think one of the side effects of, like, the hyper-individualist technocratic culture is this feeling like you just always, by a sheer act of will, have to control yourself and make your destiny. And you read all these, like, you know, stoic manuals coming out of Silicon Valley that tell you, like, take cold showers and don’t ever eat blah blah blah, and that that somehow will achieve flourishing, when I think—and this gets to Mike’s point—sometimes it’s actually not rocket science. It’s like, if you find you’re—too much of your brain life is being taken up by the AI right now and it’s not healthy and you’re not flourishing, physically move your body to somewhere like this. If you’re not paying attention to your kid because you’re on your phone and you’re sitting on the couch, physically move yourself to the floor. I bet you’re going to start to get a different perspective and remind yourself that you’ve got this other modality. I think that where we physically put ourselves makes a big difference.

Jeremy Cowart: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m sitting here going, I bet somebody in this audience has a really good answer to this. Not to dodge a question. I just—to me, it’s all the basics. I mean, what he was saying about just being—we have to be so much more intentional about being together.

One of the big trends, at least in the South, that is taking off like it’s some revolutionary thought, is people are doing these massive, like, dinner tables of a hundred-plus people. It’s like taking—it’s like this big, become this huge thing around the country. It reminds me of the Anchorman scene where he’s like, I’m doing this new thing with a silent J. It’s called yogging. I think it’s where you—it’s where you just run, you know?

And so, yeah, they were, like, getting back to the basics of sitting at a table with as many people as we can and just being together. Moving your body. Like, for me, exercise—I know I’m just a specimen of physical health. But moving my body is huge. I mean, touching grass, getting outside, you know, resisting the urge to use AI. Like, when you’re tempted to go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, just, like, not going there, because I do think we’re just on our way to being so insanely lazy. Again, I’m not up here as a pro-AI person. I’m, like, a 50-50. I’m very much against it, but I’m also seeing the good that it can do. But I’m trying to not just allow my brain to go there all the time. Yeah, drink water, move your body, get good sleep, do all the things. It works.

Adam Kronk: I love it. Who knew?

You know, I will answer the question now that I’ve had time to think about it. And I’ll just say one pretty practical thing that is also not a new concept. If you’re like me, one of the things that you’re feeling is, so much of my life now when I encounter a good idea—which is usually on my phone or on a computer screen—is I’m barely finished reading it, sometimes I don’t even finish reading it, before I—what do I need to do with this? I need to share it, I need to post it, need to forward it. And I’ve been noted—I was an English literature major, I was a high school English teacher. I love savouring good writing, and I feel like the pace and the productivity obsession has been eroding my ability to just enjoy reading and not barely be able to do it before I say, what am I going to do with this?

And so I joined a reading group with six other guys who are about my vintage. We just, like the book clubs do, we once a month get together and talk about a book that we have read and marked up and savoured, and we read our favourite passages and we talk about it. And that’s not some profound new concept, but it’s training me to go back to what I know I want to do, which is not just what can I do with this, but how can I savour this passage?

Jeremy Cowart: Can I add one thought? That’s a really good word. I will speak on behalf of all artists, all creatives. I love what he just said about savouring. When you come across an actual painting on Instagram, a photo, a band—like that live band yesterday, they were amazing. All the artists last night were amazing—take the time to tell them how much you appreciate their art. You have no idea how much that means to us. Every artist that I know right now is pretty much depressed, because now anybody can, like, with their eyes closed, type a prompt and create some insane visual. So just savour the actual intelligence, savour the art that is being made. You just have—it’s like ten times more meaningful now than it was even two years ago.

Adam Kronk: I’m so glad you added that. We probably have time for one or two questions. If there’s anything that—here we go. You got one. That didn’t take long. What should we have been talking about?

Audience member: I am not a person who believes that technology is neutral.

Adam Kronk: Yep.

Audience member: And I see the economic system within which this is all being built as really shaping the way this gets—like, I hate even hearing, you know—like, I just work in a creative agency. I now work on AI, weirdly. And, you know, like, the joy that you get from the work that you do that’s not for big brands is different, but there’s an economic necessity that drives you to do work that maybe is not fulfilling as the work that you would otherwise do. And so I just wanted to maybe hear the economic side of this. What can we do to mitigate the economic, the profit-seeking, the geopolitical ways in which this technology is being almost predetermined to really be catastrophic and not even give the good uses of it that may exist a chance to see the light of day?

Adam Kronk: I’ll say one quick thing on that, Austin, and Mike can verify that my last question is about, can tech actually be neutral, as a lot of people say. And Pope Leo has a thought on that. And he said in this encyclical, technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. So that is just to say, you and the pope agree. And I’m on your side too.

But the harder question, I think—probably most people in this room would agree with this, you can’t say the tech is neutral because of how it gets made and sold. So the harder question is, how do we counteract the clear economic momentum of pushing tech in a direction that’s not necessarily going to bring about human flourishing? Anybody got the answer to that one? Definitely extra credit if you can get this one.

Meghan Sullivan: I think one of the—another deep cut in the encyclical that I really appreciated is Pope Leo spent a decent amount of time also critiquing what he calls, like, the realism that we’re all in the grips of right now. And he means, like, political realism, this thought—this school of thought that says everything ultimately boils down to power, and the thing you got to study is who’s got the power and who doesn’t, and the people with the power are going to set the terms of life for everybody else, and that’s just everything that’s worth knowing about.

And I’m not putting you in this camp, but I think, like, all of us Americans in the audience, like, this is—we’re just marinating in realism right now. It’s all we talk about, is, like, who has the power right now and who doesn’t have the power. And what Pope Leo reminds us of is—it’s kind of a central truth of Christianity—that there’s, like, the manifest power, which Rome thought that they had, and then there’s actual power, which oftentimes you can’t see if, in fact, you’re just totally focused on who has the manifest power.

And so I think right now we’re in the grips of, like, which tech company is going to get a trillion-dollar valuation first? And who in the Trump administration might end up regulating this technology? Or is it going to be China or America? And we’re just keeping score in the power game, which, you know, we’d be naive to ignore, but not paying nearly enough attention to—to the theme of this conference—all the power that’s in here, is in the understory.

And you look at this really practically. The encyclical came out on Monday. I got asked by tons of newspapers, why would tech leaders go to the Vatican for this meeting? And why have tech leaders been engaging with the Vatican? It’s like, well, they’re not—they recognize that they have a certain kind of power, but their power totally depends on a large portion of planet Earth being willing to use their products. And actually, it’s their users have the power to just absolutely break these companies. If large numbers of human beings are unwilling to pay the subscription to this AI agent that they’re going to sell us in December, then they’re toast. Maybe the US economy is also toast. But just to say, there’s always power—are not seeing—that could really reverse the course of things. And I think that’s one of the things that maybe at this gathering we’re sort of called to understand.

Adam Kronk: Beautiful. Thank you for spending some time. Let’s thank our three panelists.