Megan Sullivan

But there are other companies where the people that work there and lead these companies, they're actually pretty curious and worried about what they're doing.

And they want to make money but they also want to do good in the world.

They want to leave a great legacy.

They have children.

The people that run these companies think about the next generation.

And they realize that they've been spending so much time at a breakneck pace trying to develop AI that they have not paused to ask some of these bigger questions about why we're making it and what society should look like with it in it.

But another probably bigger component to what a university like Notre Dame is trying to do

is I disagree with this premise that the only people on planet Earth who matter are the people who are making the AI.

In fact, I think that those companies would be making a terrible mistake

to believe that only the developers matter, that the strong will do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must.

Because at the end of the day, they only have a business model if we use their products.

And we are not just passive, non-playable characters that AI is just happening to.

We have agency.

It's not only bots that have agency, Manoush.

We have agency.

We have the ability as users to bring our preferences and values and ethics to this question about what kind of AI we are going to use, how we're going to let it be deployed in our universities, in our schools, in our workplaces.

And one of the most important things that ethicists can do is wake people up to their personal agency and help them reclaim this idea.

You as a user are allowed to ask some pretty interesting and profound questions.

about whether or not you want that AI product on your iPhone, whether or not you want to give it to your children, how you're going to vote for AI policy regulation the next time you vote in a local election.

And one of the things that we want to do is help users and help folks who kind of feel like they've been left behind by this big AI wave realize that they're a part of the conversation.