"What AI Will Never Have" with Dr. Meghan Sullivan

Show Notes:

Philosopher Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame and director of the university's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, joins Chris and Eddie for a conversation that starts with Socrates and ends up in a conference room at an AI company. Meghan traces her own path from an intentionally obscure grad-school dissertation on the nature of time to teaching "God and the Good Life," one of Notre Dame's most popular courses. From there the conversation turns to her current work on AI and human dignity, built around a framework she calls DELTA — Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, Agency. Along the way: a thought experiment about an all-knowing "Guru app," a visit with Anthropic's engineering team, and her case for why she thinks this disruptive AI moment is exactly the moment the Christian tradition was built for.

Resources & Links:

The Good Life Method — Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko (Penguin Press, 2022)

Time Biases — Meghan Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 2018)

The Human Delta (Meghan's Substack on AI and human dignity): https://aidelta.substack.com/

Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good: https://ethics.nd.edu/people/meghan-sullivan/

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, referenced in the conversation: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html