Notre Dame AI Ethics Project Wins $50.8 Million Grant
The University of Notre Dame’s Institute for the Ethics and the Common Good (ECG), directed by philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan, has received a $50.8 million grant for work on various moral problems related to artificial intelligence (AI).
The grant is from the Lilly Endowment, a private foundation that supports educational, religious, and community development projects.
It follows a $539,000 planning grant awarded by the foundation to the ECG last year.
Funds will further develop and implement what Sullivan calls the “DELTA” approach to AI:
As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, Christian institutions must look beyond an “ethical floor” of safety, privacy, and transparency. DELTA proposes a deeper, faith-informed approach rooted in enduring Christian values: Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency.
The grant may be the largest single grant awarded for a project led by a philosophy professor.
Meghan Sullivan
According to a press release from Notre Dame, the grant
will fund the further development of a shared, faith-based ethical framework that scholars, religious leaders, tech leaders, teachers, journalists, young people and the broader public can draw upon to discern appropriate uses of artificial intelligence, or AI. The grant will also support the establishment of a robust, interconnected network that will provide practical resources to help navigate challenges posed by rapidly developing AI. Based on principles and values from Christian traditions, the framework is designed to be accessible to people of all faith perspectives.
Notre Dame’s DELTA network will be organized around interdisciplinary and intergenerational communities of practice focused on education, pastoral ministry and public engagement. The communities of practice will come together to learn about and engage with the principles of the faith-based ethical framework. They will nurture relationships between those who are developing AI technology and those in education, workplaces, religious communities and a variety of public settings who must discern ethical ways to use AI.
As part of the project, ECG will launch a series of programs to encourage and support young adults to lead with convictions shaped by DELTA principles. In addition, by developing hubs in communities in Silicon Valley and the Northeastern U.S., the institute will invite tech leaders and the public to engage with DELTA principles through issue-focused events and retreats.
You can learn more about the grant here.
Below is a video of Professor Sullivan speaking at the Notre Dame Summit on the DELTA approach to AI.
Fascinating. The fourth link to **DELTA** principles and the last link to the keynote address by Meghan Sullivan are particularly useful. Thank you.
What I don’t get is what is specifically or uniquely Christian about this – Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or most any community, faith-based or not, including religious naturalists – might be interested in where an alliance between virtue ethics and rapidly developing AI technology is going to lead.
I signed up for newsletter from the DELTA link and hope to learn more of public outreach initiatives.
I fail to understand, generally, what all the tons of millions poured into AI-related philosophy research can be used for. Will they, because of all the millions, figure out if AI is or can be conscious, be a moral agent, or whatever? I see that millions can be spent on ‘public outreach’, and on hiring an army of doctoral students and postdocs and whatnot (who then don’t get jobs, statistically speaking), but otherwise?
Anyway, the point is not the criticism of this project, or any project; the money could be spent on worse things, I really just genuinely wonder, what is the point of spending 50 million (and hundreds of millions elsewhere) on something that philosophers tend to do from the armchair without the assistance of labs, large groups, infrastructure etc.
Given the literally hundreds of billions being spend on building AI, I’ll say that 50 mil for AI ethics is pretty reasonable (and probably should be more).
Agree with Eric (which seems very rare on AI)!
I’d like to see a commitment to examining ethics similar to that with the Human Genome Project, where 3-5% of its budget would be focused on ethics, legal, and societal implications (ELSI).
But that ain’t gonna happen… ☹️
I am not against the grant. I am simply curious, not just in this case, what one can spend these moneys on. Other than hiring. Given how the world is, sure, let them spend the money (50 million is roughly as much as Elon can spend on his breakfast). Still, on what exactly (if not on breakfast)?
We may have different responses to AI stuff, but I think we agree on lots of the premises. I think AI is really powerful, really dangerous, and maybe an existential threat to philosophy (not to mention a host of other areas). I’m guessing we probably agree on those points!
Hi Eric, yes, I’d agree with all three premises, but the reasons why may be different, which could lead to different conclusions.
I’d agree with the the first two not because AI is really powerful and dangerous in itself, but mostly because AI is overestimated by so many people. And that leads to overtrust and dangerous use-cases when AI is operating in areas that exceed its capabilities, esp. without effective guardrails.
Either way, good luck to all of us. Happy holidays!
This is a nice concrete proposal.
Why are you pessimistic about it happening? It doesn’t happen all on its own of course.
Why? Because I pay attention to the news and trends.
I’d love to be wrong here. If you’re seeing any evidence otherwise, feel free to let us know.
Presumably all those involved will need top-tier subscriber access. Maybe even some fancy GPUs of their own?
Yes, but jokes aside, I genuinely wonder what goes into these applications, what they say they need the money for. What I see over here in Europe is that a larger ERC philosophy grant will hire a bunch of phds and postdocs and organize a shedload of seminars, workshops, and conferences. And that is more or less what you can do in a philosophy project. Now, this grant is roughly ten times the size of the largest ERC grant (the synergy grant, which to my knowledge, has never been given to philosophers). Sure, they will build up a center of some sort and maintain it for some years (so, again, lots of hiring without job prospects and lots of events). My question was whether this will indeed get us closer to answering the main philosophical questions surrounding AI. To declare, I have no stake in the matter, I don’t work on AI, and generally I don’t want grants, so I am just genuinely puzzled.
I agree with you 100%, in general philosophers should receive less money.
I didn’t say that and didn’t want to imply it either. But it is a question how money is best spent, on and in philosophy or outside philosophy. Giving money to establish permanent jobs seems like money better spent, at least in many cases, than organizing the umpteenth conference and hiring yet another postdoc. None of this requires that the money not be spent on philosophy. My question was meant openly
and sincerely.
I’d like to know more about the “faith-based” or “faith-informed” parameter. $50.8m would be an enormous grant for an “ethics” grant, with no parameters! I admit I’ve not read the grant, so I’m very curious to learn more.
I, too, am curious why “faith-based” or “faith-informed” parameters are relevant to exploring virtue ethics intersected with AI.
Perhaps the prospect and achievement of the University of Notre Dame’s imprimatur, together with seed funding and an extraordinary $50 million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment helped shape the proposals of the grantees.
DESIRE framework:
DignityEmbodimentLoveTranscendenceAgencyhttps://ethics.nd.edu/programs/faith-based-frameworks-for-ai-ethics/delta/
“Transcendence” sticks out as potentially faith-oriented, summarized here as:
With some obvious deletions, Albert Einstein might be said to be a religious naturalist who acknowledged transcendence in some sense.
Why then this Christian exceptionalism?
This. A million times. And in a context in which “faith” is a clear dogwhistle for “right wing Christian” . I suspect that aspect of this is all ND driven– Lilly doesn’t have the history of devotion to right wing anti-civil rights causes that does, say, Templeton. To the contrary, it was the Lilly foundation that put the nail in the coffin of Pence’s ‘we don’t have to serve the gays’ law some years back. It’s true they had a financial interest in making sure that law didn’t stick around. Nevertheless…
Congrats and good luck!
In related news, here’s an article by an AI advisor to the Vatican about how they’re thinking about superintelligence:
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/paolo-benanti-catholic-church-vatican-superintelligence-artificial-intelligence-pope
As great as it is to see philosophers winning big grants, and congratulations to Prof. Sullivan, it’s always more than a little concerning to see (conservative) religious institutions throwing their considerable financial weight around in the context of research…
I don’t know the details of Prof. Sullivan’s relationship with the Lilly Endowment. I certainly hope that she’ll be able to keep a healthy distance between the political interests of institutionalised religion. And the Lilly Endowment is less bad than some of the other institutions out there. But there’s no way to take $50mln without at least some implicit strings.
This is, to be clear, no personal attack on Prof. Sullivan and I absolutely wish her and her project the best. I’m just always concerned to see any influence of religious institutions on academia.
What a ridiculous take.
We’re not talking about Liberty or Bob Jones University. Notre Dame is one of the top, private research universities in the world.
As for Lilly, what’s your issue there? Where would you prefer folks to get their money from, the US government? At this point, academics have a far greater chance avoiding inappropriate strings taking money from Lilly, Mellon, Templeton, etc., than taking it from the NEH, NSF, etc.
Congrats to Prof Sullivan! We should all hope that more people see the important role that philosophers can play in contributing to the important, ongoing discussions in our world, and that they’ll acknowledge this potential contribution by providing financial support for our work.
I don’t think it is a ridiculous question. Perhaps both have strings attached and perhaps both funding source is therefore not a good place to turn to. I know nothing about Lilly (first I thought it was the pharma company), but surely, one can ask questions about its suitability. Why not? It is hardly a good argument to say that since another option is even worse, you should just get the money from them. This argument works only if either Lilly is a perfectly fine source of funding for academic research (which was the original question and was not answered) or if the grantee must get funding for some reason and so even if the choice is between two bad options, they should choose the least bad one. Given the standing of the grantee and the size of the grant, it is hard to believe that this second option was the case, so that leaves us with the first. Which question, again, was not answered.
“Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private foundation based in Indianapolis. The Endowment was created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly, Sr. and his sons – Eli and J.K. Jr. – through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. Although the gifts of stock remain a financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location.”
https://lillyendowment.org/about/
> I know nothing about Lilly
Would you consider doing a bit of research then before posting an uninformed comment?
I don’t think reading Lilly’s marketing material on their website is going to help much. And I have no local knowledge not being based in the US. As for the dialectical situation, the original claim to which I reacted used the judgment ‘ridiculous’ and I pointed out that without a proper comparison of funding sources this judgment does not stand. You tell me that I should not write anything without informing myself properly but it wasn’t me who didn’t support their judgment with information about the funding source. I have merely asked for this information. So, if I am then deemed to have made an uninformed comment, then so did the commenter I have responded to. However, and again, I have only asked for the missing info to support their claim. I don’t therefore see the point of your intervention.
It is curious to an outsider like me how on earth religious groups became so good at funding academia. Years ago, a fellow grad I knew, who failed to get grad funding otherwise, got a fund from a religious source that was twice the grad stipend, provided that she wrote something remotely religious. I was new to academia then and proportionately puzzled.
I know Sullivan and believe that she will use this funding in a totally good way. Still, I find it puzzling how so much money floats from those sources!
Hove you ever looked at where the underlying funding for some of the older European schools originally came from?
At least they are not contributing to the race dynamic that is already threatening the global economy, is poised to threaten large numbers of human jobs, and may threaten our very lives. We need to pursue the three aims of technical alignment, political coordination to implement any such technical solution globally, and the philosophical and humanities work of determining what we should be aligning these AIs to.
I wonder if the grantors would receive a higher philosophical ROI by giving institutions like ND 50mil to fund new tenure lines.
From the press release:
They [i.e., the communities of practice] will nurture relationships between those who are developing AI technology and those in education, workplaces, religious communities and a variety of public settings who must discern ethical ways to use AI.
“Discern” is an interesting word choice. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I think that “determine” or “decide on” would be more natural or obvious choices. “Discernment” in the Catholic context means roughly (as I understand it, feel free to tweak or correct this) the process by which one figures out whether one has a religious vocation. Of course, “to discern” has various meanings, but I wonder whether that influenced (perhaps unconsciously?) the verb choice here. (Yes, this comment is a minor point, but maybe because I have little interest in the substantive issues surrounding AI, the language is what struck me.)
Congrats! That’s a huge grant in a field substantially in need of more grant money. We should celebrate that.
Congratulations!! Wonderful news