Pepperdine University announced the launch of the Institute for Wisdom and AI, a new interdisciplinary initiative rooted in the university’s Christian mission that will bring faith perspectives and academic expertise to questions about artificial intelligence and its impact on human life. President Jim Gash announced the institute in his opening remarks at Pepperdine’s sixth annual Human-Centered AI Conference, held alongside the inaugural Global Summit on Faith in AI on the university’s Malibu campus.
The two-day gathering, co-chaired by Fabien Scalzo, director of Pepperdine’s Keck Data Science Institute, and Johnnie Moore, vice chancellor of Pepperdine’s Washington, D.C., campus, convened Turing Award laureate Judea Pearl, Caltech’s Katie Bouman, UK AI Security Institute director Henry de Zoete, and leading researchers from UCLA, USC, MIT, and Berkeley, together with Christian leaders from the Orthodox, Coptic, and evangelical communities and religious leaders representing the Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim communities.
“‘The next great division of humanity,’ Wendell Berry warned a quarter-century ago, ‘will be between those who live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines,'” Gash said. “To be a creature is to be made by God, in His image, for relationship with Him and with one another. That is something artificial intelligence may attempt to imitate, but can never replicate. The question before us is how to keep living as creatures while our machines grow more powerful, and how to build this technology so that it deepens our humanity rather than diminishes it. Pepperdine has never been afraid of hard questions. Our Affirmation Statement says that ‘truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly in every discipline.’ The Institute for Wisdom and AI is that conviction applied to the defining question of our age.”
Institute for Wisdom and AI research priorities
The institute will be housed in Seaver College, Pepperdine’s residential undergraduate liberal arts college, with significant participation from the School of Public Policy, and its program will extend across the university’s schools as the work grows. Its research agenda is explicitly practical and will address how AI can create economic opportunity rather than strip citizens of the dignity of work and what a labor market looks like when entry-level white-collar jobs are automated; how the technology can be shaped by principles of democracy and human liberty while limiting influence and security risks that restrict individual freedoms; how AI can deliver breakthroughs in medicine and mental health while maintaining patient-centered care; and how a university can put unprecedented computational power in students’ hands without hollowing out critical thinking, deep reading, and moral formation.
The institute will convene AI laboratories, policymakers, military and intelligence leaders, business executives, and religious leaders, and bring the perspective of faith into decision-making rooms in Washington and Silicon Valley. When fully funded, it will support faculty and research fellows across business, law, public policy, psychology, and the sciences, produce applied research on AI’s effects on employment, family life, education, and national security, and examine deeper questions of alignment, agency, and human flourishing. The institute will also prepare students to be fluent in the technology and equipped to lead with it in the marketplace, the classroom, the clinic, and government.
The institute begins its work immediately, gathering each fall in Malibu and each year at one of Pepperdine’s campuses elsewhere, in Washington, D.C., Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Japan, with the first international convening planned for Geneva later this year.
“A Christian university offers a distinctive approach to the study of artificial intelligence,” said Jay Brewster, provost of Pepperdine University. “The temptation is to treat AI purely as an engineering problem. However, this technology is already reaching deeply into all facets of society. To navigate the change that is coming requires an evaluation of important questions regarding personhood, human agency, and societal values as AI becomes more fully integrated into our lives. These are topics our universities have been exploring for centuries and our faculty scholars examine every day. The Institute for Wisdom and AI at Pepperdine will provide structured opportunities for bringing critical leaders together, for funding scholarly efforts around human-centered AI, and for adding a Christian university to this important conversation.”
The launch builds on years of leadership by Fabien Scalzo, who established the Human-Centered AI Conference as one of the first academic gatherings in the country to put humanity, rather than technology alone, at the center of the AI conversation. Under his direction, the Keck Data Science Institute has produced a generation of Pepperdine graduates now working at the frontier of the field, including the university’s first Rhodes Scholar, Sean Wu, who returned to campus this week as a panelist.
The institute launches with founding seed gifts and with relationships already in place at the frontier of the field. This year, Pepperdine leaders have met with executives at Anthropic and OpenAI on the development of artificial intelligence. The institute will grow through partnerships with AI laboratories, foundations, philanthropists, and religious institutions that share its conviction that the most consequential technology of our time must be built to serve humanity.
“We believe the development of AI can and must be oriented toward the true north of human flourishing,” said Gash. “That will take wisdom, and it will take courage, and Pepperdine intends to bring both.”
For more information about the Human-Centered AI Conference and the Global Summit on Faith in AI, contact Pepperdine Public Relations at pr@pepperdine.edu or 818.702.1401.
About Pepperdine University
Pepperdine University is a private Christian university located 30 miles west of Downtown Los Angeles in Malibu, California. Rooted in the Christian tradition, Pepperdine is committed to the pursuit of truth through academic and scholarly excellence and to embodying Christian faith and values. The university prepares approximately 9,000 scholars across Seaver College; the Pepperdine College of Health Sciences; and four graduate schools: the Caruso School of Law; the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School; the Graduate School of Education and Psychology; and the School of Public Policy.
