In Silicon Valley, We Need Another Voice: Learning, Loving, and Living in the Age of AI

In Silicon Valley, we need to hear another voice — a deep conversation about the human future in the age of AI, with guests from NVIDIA, Notre Dame, and the faith community, in a theater with a hundred years of history, exploring three questions: In the age of AI, how do we learn? How do we love? How do we live and work?

A few lines stayed with me:

1. Information is getting cheaper; wisdom is getting more expensive. AI can give instant answers, but telling truth from falsehood and making sound judgments still requires independent human thinking.

2. AI can simulate care, but it cannot replace real relationships. It can encourage you around the clock, but genuine intimacy requires vulnerability, understanding, and shared burden on both sides.

3. Delegating work is not delegating responsibility. A CEO of the future may manage hundreds of AI agents, but the more AI executes, the clearer leaders must be about the boundaries of their own responsibility. And what deserves even more vigilance: AI will amplify not only our capabilities, but also our greed, arrogance, and biases.

4. AI makes us more efficient, but not necessarily better off. If agents work day and night while we check results at 3 a.m., is that real freedom?

The event introduced the DELTA framework: Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency — a reminder that human value was never only about productivity. Today, companies measure AI by performance, cost, productivity, and user growth. But should we also ask: Does AI help the vulnerable? Does it improve people's well-being? Does it strengthen real relationships? Does it give people more agency? For a CEO, this means asking not only about ROI, but: What kind of corporate culture and human life are we creating?

As an executive coach who has lived through the ups and downs of founding companies, this resonates deeply. We used to define ourselves by performance, capability, and achievement. Now that AI may outperform us, can we still clearly know who we are? AI can work for us, but it cannot grow for us; it can amplify our capabilities, but it cannot build our character. So the more powerful technology becomes, the more leaders must hold on to their judgment, their sense of responsibility, and their humanity.