I am not a fan of AI - "Artificial Intelligence." The way I see it, AI invites us to forego efforts to develop, augment, and extend our own "real" intelligence, proposing, instead, that we should use a computer program which claims to be able to do whatever we want to do both quicker and better than we could do it for ourselves. Want a birthday sonnet for your beloved? Why waste your time trying to write one? AI can pump out some options in less than a minute.
If we want to maintain and improve our thinking, we actually need to think for ourselves. That's my belief, anyway (that's what I think), and I, therefore, have almost no patience for the idea that there are some real benefits to AI.
A number of my friends disagree, and I do concede that mobilizing a computer program to do our thinking for us does have some attractions. One of my friends told me that his AI companion is like a "tutor," providing assistance to him throughout his day. Relying on an AI "tutor" to provide guidance to us is virtually certain, in my mind, to diminish our own capacity, individually (and ultimately collectively), to think for ourselves. The way I see it, the longrun impacts of AI are pretty horrendous. You can see that I am truly not a fan of AI.
That said, and having just outlined my personal views about AI, let me give a shout out to Anthropic, one of the companies working tirelessly to develop ever more sophisticated and capable versions of artificial intelligence. I want to refer you, specifically, to an article that was published in the Saturday/Sunday, September 20-21, 2025, edition of The Wall Street Journal. That article focused, mainly, on Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, and how his political and other views clash with those of the Trump Administration. The front page article, by Berber Jin and Amrith Ramkumar, is titled this way, online: "A Tech CEO’s Lonely Fight Against Trump."
Probably, you need to be a subscriber to get access to the article. If that's true, and the link I have just provided gets you nowhere, here are a few excerpts that cheered me up, at least a little bit, about the nation's love affair with Artificial Intelligence:
Amodei joined OpenAI shortly after it was founded as a nonprofit, then left in 2020 after clashing with Altman, its chief executive, over safety to start Anthropic. He is a believer in the earn-to-give movement, and committed to donating 80% of his founding stock to charity alongside his co-founders—a stake now worth billions of dollars.
A vegetarian since childhood, Amodei, now 42, often dotes on the chickens he keeps in a coop in his backyard, outfitted with a camera so he can watch over them. His Slack profile picture shows him smiling with a stuffed panda, and his office has a stuffed animal Amodei fondly calls “the wise octopus.”
He is also the AI CEO most vocal about the technology’s potential to end civilization, warning that there is a 10% to 25% chance that AI goes rogue and unleashes planetary chaos. Around the start of Trump’s first term, Amodei warned in an AI presentation to industry colleagues that giving Trump control of powerful AI would be dangerous, and compared him in a slide to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Amodei chose not to release an early version of Claude in the summer of 2022, fearing that it would start a dangerous technology race. Some Anthropic employees also indicated in a Slack poll they didn’t want to release the chatbot for the same reason. OpenAI released ChatGPT a few weeks later, forcing Anthropic to play catch-up. Amodei said he doesn’t regret the decision....
Amodei supported a 2023 executive order that put guardrails around the country’s best models and backed restrictions on chip exports to prevent countries like China from developing cutting-edge AI....
Amodei publicly warned in late May that AI could destroy about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, countering the administration’s message about AI benefiting the economy (emphasis added).
Replacing humans with machines is not, in my view, a good idea. And there are lots of other problems that come along with AI, too, at least as it is now being developed. Those negative impacts specifically include how its inordinate power demands are likely to make it harder to deal with Global Warming, and how they will, most likely, also undermine agriculture and destroy our precious water resources.
If humans are going to pursue AI (I continue to vote "not in favor"), we ought to have skeptics in charge of the effort!
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Thank you for the introduction to this alternative CEO, one who sees his leadership as responsible for the common good. I'll be looking for more about him and Anthropic.
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