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Will AI make people stupider?: Anthropic CEO’s candid response to Nikhil Kamath in Bengaluru
Dario Amodei is a biologist who went on to launch Anthropic, the company that developed Claude AI. He appeared on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast.
Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, recently spoke with Nikhil Kamath about AI and its impact on the world. The tech leader also discussed India's role in this evolving technology landscape. In the ‘People by WTF’ podcast, Amodei answered whether he feels that AI would impact the cognitive abilities of humans and make the race “stupider”.
“I sat down with Dario Amodei in Bangalore. He built Claude, but he started as a biologist looking for a tool to cure disease. Today, he's at the helm of an AI revolution that he compares to a tsunami society is actively ignoring. We got into the heavy stuff: why Anthropic secretly withheld a working model before ChatGPT existed, whether AI is on the verge of consciousness, and if outsourcing our thinking is going to make humans measurably stupider. Dario makes the case that coding is a dying skill, critical thinking is our last real edge, and the absurd concentration of power in AI right now is a massive problem, even though he’s one of the people holding it,” Kamath wrote on YouTube while sharing a video of the podcast.
Will AI make humans stupider?
During their discussion, the Zerodha co-founder asks Amodei, “Do you think humans will become stupider as a race in the next decade?” He continues, “Coz.. if a way we are exporting thinking and cognition to systems.”
Amodei responds, “Yeah… I think if we deploy AI in the wrong way, if we deploy it carelessly, then, yes, people could become stupider.”
He continues, “Even if an AI is always gonna be better than you at something you can still learn that thing, right? You can still enrich yourself intellectually.”
He says it is a choice humans have to make as individual companies, as individual people, and as a society.
Dario Amodei’s advice for young people:
When being asked what skill sets people should learn in the present era if they are thinking of starting a startup or pursuing higher studies, the tech leader says, “I would think about tasks that are human-centric.”
“What industry would I pick outside of something which has a physical interface?” Kamath asks. Amodei replies, “Anything you are building on AI.” He also mentions that anything in the semiconductor space will be helpful.
Who is Dario Amodei?
Dario Amodei, prior to founding Anthropic, served as the Vice President of Research at Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Dario earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
