This is the third installment of Meghan Sullivan’s series about DELTA, Notre Dame’s faith-based framework for a world of powerful AI.
Let’s talk about the second letter in DELTA: E, for embodiment.
For Christians, it is extraordinarily important that God chose to take on a mortal human body, and that its vulnerability, physical limitations and susceptibility to pain are all things that God deems worthy of himself. The incarnation validates the essential goodness of our physical existence.
At the science fiction fringe of work in artificial intelligence right now, there’s a misguided hope that we can make ourselves immortal by somehow capturing a digital copy of memories, our personalities and our manners of speech through data-based models that we upload to the cloud.
Christians should resist this. When we die in this life, our earthly bodies — as we know them — are gone. We can’t achieve immortality through a product that is sold to us by programmers in Silicon Valley. That’s not the road to eternal life. What makes our human lives meaningful is the fact that they’re short and finite, and that we live out those lives in imperfect bodies that are easily hurt.
How does this concept of embodiment affect our practical deliberations about AI? First, this new technology promises to revolutionize medicine and healthcare. We see this in the work of John M. Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google’s DeepMind, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 by harnessing these large models to discover new ways of creating proteins and compounds to develop new drugs.
AI has the power to help cure diseases that have stymied human scientists in the past. But this era of precision medicine is going to require a new focus on bioethics to accompany this technology. There are profound questions about where healing and enhancement differ, and which aspects of our embodied life we should attempt to preserve and which aspects scientists and medicine should leave alone.
On a more day-to-day level, the rise of social media and the internet has meant that significant portions of our lives happen in digital environments rather than in physical environments. Part of our commitment to embodiment is the idea that the physical presence of others is deeply valuable in our lives.
We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we lost our ability to be physically present with others. We experienced the profound loneliness of isolation as we worked, studied and lived in digital spaces. We prayed in digital spaces, too. But something critical is missing when we attend a virtual Mass: the embodied relationality of worship. We lose touch with the physical community of the Church, and in that digital space, we hunger — deeply and intensely — for the Eucharist.
And then there are the “Godbots.” These chatbots, which are trained on religious texts and the work of ministers, present another type of challenge to our embodiment. Rather than seek advice from a trusted priest or minister, you can propose your moral dilemma to an on-call chatbot who will give you an immediate reply from “God.” There are many aspects of this technology that we should push back on — the training data, authority and potential biases. Even more critical is the missed opportunity for meaningful encounter: If we turn to a chatbot for advice instead of another human, we miss the opportunity to connect with a fellow companion on the road to Emmaus.
We are all embodied, and this draws us both into communion with others and into the mystery of the Incarnation. The “E” in DELTA reminds us that as our digital lives become superpowered, we must deliberately and thoughtfully preserve space for physical presence and connection.
Meghan Sullivan
Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and director of University-wide Ethics Initiative and the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good
Nov. 7
