MAHONEY’S MOMENTS
Jim has written regular leadership-related blog posts, along with other several other leaders, for Ohio University’s Voinovich Academy. On this page, you can read his monthly blog posts, Mahoney’s Moments. These moments are aimed at a variety of topics and the content is designed for the moment and intended to cause you to reflect, perhaps consider an approach, or entertain a new idea in your life or work. Enjoy!
September 2026: Where is AI Leadership?
A friend recently shared an Artificial Intelligence riddle that goes like this: A teacher uses AI to create a lesson plan that is used to assign homework to students. The students use AI to complete the assignment and the teacher in turn has AI grade the assignment. Who learns? This past week, Artificial Intelligence has been leading national news in light of developers quitting their jobs and sounding the alarm that AI is a definitive threat to humanity. Anthropic (one of the leading AI companies) CEO Dario Amodei basically confirmed this notion that AI does pose such a threat to people unless steps aren’t taken to slow its’ progress. He also revealed that AI offers extraordinary opportunities to extend life with advances in healthcare and solve some of the world’s most vexing problems.
Is this threat real? Watch the quarter finals of Americas Got Talent from a week ago where a young man does a choreographed dance with robots who are twisting and turning perfectly with him while brandishing swords. The judges were astounded by the performance while quickly acknowledging the demonstration scared them. A US Senator said this week that it is important to increase our capabilities with AI so our robots can beat some other countries’ robots in a future war. If all this weren’t true, it would sound like a sci-fi comic story.
Are these warnings akin to messages our government received prior to the attacks of 9/11? Do we trust AI companies to regulate themselves? Does government at any level have the expertise and ability to place guardrails around any of these issues? If we slow our progress, do we cede the AI race to China? Lots of questions and few answers. This is when leadership is needed most. No action by anyone, of course, is a decision. Should we all just wait and see what happens? Sometimes, things are best when left alone. Is this one of those times? Or, is this the time for persons of standing or organizations to step up, define the problem honestly, and take action to accelerate the progress and promise of AI to help humanity while at the same time protect us from the worst of it?
We seem to be at an inflection point now in light of the admissions of folks involved with the creation of AI, discussion at national levels, and our own local experiences with Anthropic, Claude, Chat GPT, or Gemini. What would you recommend and to whom? Now or later? Or in the words of ancient teaching: if not now, when? If not you, who?