Program on AI and the Development of Ethics in Agents
In ancient Greece, paideia referred to the holistic education and training of citizens for political and cultural life. ND-PAIDEIA is a humanities research center at Notre Dame that takes up a parallel task of forming ethical agents in a new era of artificial intelligence systems, attending both to human users and designers of these systems and to the systems themselves. ND-PAIDEIA is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and supported by Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, the Institute for Social Concerns, and the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
ND-PAIDEIA features a network of multidisciplinary researchers working to think collectively about how to best cultivate human flourishing amidst the emergence of powerful AI systems. During its first three years, ND-PAIDEIA will take a virtue-based approach to the ethics of generative AI, focusing on two central themes: creativity & human judgment (2026-2027) and citizenship & justice (2027-2028). Together, these themes address two distinctively human capabilities: our capacity to develop, evaluate, and choose our own goals or ends and our political life in community, with its aspiration to be governed by reasoned discussions of justice. ND-PAIDEIA is dedicated to using insights from the humanities to help us design and use generative AI systems in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, those core aspects of what it means to be human.