This September, I had the blessing of being invited to attend the 2026 DELTA Summit hosted by the University of Notre Dame. The Summit was organized by the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the university. Its DELTA project, the foundation of the three-day conference, “provides practical resources for scholars, faith leaders, tech leaders, teachers, journalists, young people, and the broader public to help navigate challenges posed by rapidly developing AI.”Â
The question that I pondered those three days was, “What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?”
It has been said that we’re living through another Industrial Revolution in regards to the rapid evolution and implementation of artificial intelligence tools and capabilities. Our lives have been changed in the span of a few years because of the introduction of ChatGPT and Claude. AI assistants are on every conceivable website, and there’s even a push for AI chatbots to simulate human contact. The Summit sought to bring together a wide array of people to discuss why a complete reliance on AI is destructive for humanity, and what we can do about it.
One of the keynote talks was by Dr. D. Graham Burnett, a professor at Princeton University. He talked about an economy that we all actively participate in but rarely realize is there: the attention economy. According to Dr. Burnett and others studying human attention, “Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.” Social media has commodified our attention, reducing it to rapid twenty-second bursts on a phone screen. What sort of productive, deep thoughts can we have if we don’t give ourselves time to be bored? Dr. Burnett brought up the concept of the attention economy as “modern-day slavery”, one that doesn’t discriminate based on race, sex, or any other discernible characteristics. We’re all vulnerable to it, and unless we do something about it, we’re going to sink deeper into its grasp.
This has opened the door for outsourcing our ways of thinking, like using AI chatbots to dictate our routines and habits, to do our work for us, and to become our “friends”. The attention economy conversation carried over into a discussion led by USF’s own virtue ethicist, Dr. Lily Abadal. Her presentation explained how we can promote a human-centered pedagogy. She focused on how classrooms have their own ecologies, and by helping students learn how to see the true, the good, and the beautiful in life, we can teach them how to choose those things as well. Using AI to do an assignment for you is easy, but growing to love the process of learning is edifying. This may not be intuitive for a generation that has been taught to follow what is the easiest path to success, to getting a degree, and building a life. However, there’s value in recognizing that the process of learning and the interior formation it brings will always be superior to anything that AI can produce for us.
The closing thoughts I was left with from the Summit came from the first keynote lecture. They set the tone for me throughout the three days, and have been on my mind since. I think that Dr. Rosalind Picard was right to begin the conference by discussing that what makes us human—what makes us different from merely intellectual machines—is that we have the capacity for fellowship with God. In that, we are called to fellowship with our fellow humans. Dr. Picard discussed the advancements in not only conversational AI agents, but also humanoid AI robots, and the damage that they can pose to human relationships. Take Lovense’s new sex-robot, for instance, which “combines physical intimacy with conversational intelligence”. Why should we create relationships with another human, who can have a host of imperfections, when there’s an option for a perfect companion instead? Picard argued that we need to promote a holistic and dignified view of the human person. Not one where worth is based on what we can gain from one another, but one where we recognize the inherent value each human is born with.
I left the conference full of more questions than I’d had going into it. I learned a lot, and was challenged in the conversations I’d had. There are a lot of factors that tie into the AI conversation. Most of the talks centered on the human-ethics aspect of it, not having time to talk deeply about environmental impacts, or the impact that rapidly developing technology will have in further stratifying poorer nations. But my main takeaway was that people are hungry for connection and meaning. Instead of continuing to isolate ourselves into our own technological worlds, we can begin to push back on the over-AI-ization of life by spending time with someone else and leaving the chatbot at home.Â