Co-Intelligence, the groundbreaking book by Ethan Mollick, unveils the secrets to thriving in the age of AI. Dive into this transformative guide and discover how to harness the power of artificial intelligence for unparalleled success in your personal and professional life.
Don’t miss out on this game-changing opportunity to embrace AI and take your life to new heights. Keep reading to learn the invaluable insights and strategies revealed in Co-Intelligence.
Table of Contents
Genres
Technology and the Future, Corporate Culture, Career Success, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Future of Work, Personal Development, Innovation, Technology & Society, Productivity, Collaboration, Digital Transformation, Self-Improvement
In “Co-Intelligence,” Ethan Mollick presents a compelling vision for the future of human-AI collaboration. He argues that by embracing AI as a partner rather than a competitor, we can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity, creativity, and success.
Mollick explores the transformative potential of AI across various domains, from business and education to healthcare and personal growth. Through engaging anecdotes and cutting-edge research, he demonstrates how individuals and organizations can leverage AI to augment their capabilities and achieve remarkable outcomes.
Mollick also addresses common concerns surrounding AI, such as job displacement and ethical considerations, offering pragmatic solutions and a hopeful outlook for the future. Ultimately, “Co-Intelligence” provides a roadmap for navigating the AI revolution and harnessing its power for the betterment of ourselves and society as a whole.
Review
“Co-Intelligence” is a must-read for anyone seeking to thrive in the age of AI. Ethan Mollick’s insightful and accessible writing style makes complex concepts easy to grasp, while his real-world examples bring the transformative potential of AI to life.
The book offers a balanced perspective, acknowledging both the opportunities and challenges posed by AI, and provides practical strategies for individuals and organizations to adapt and succeed. Mollick’s emphasis on the importance of human-AI collaboration is particularly compelling, challenging the notion that AI will replace humans and instead highlighting how it can enhance our capabilities and open up new possibilities.
“Co-Intelligence” is a timely and essential guide for navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, and its insights will undoubtedly shape the way we live and work in the years to come. Whether you are an entrepreneur, professional, or simply curious about the future, this book is an invaluable resource that will leave you inspired and equipped to embrace the power of co-intelligence.
Introduction: Discover how AI can supercharge your potential
Co-Intelligence (2024) explores the benefits of partnering with generative, language-based artificial intelligence (AI) in education, the workplace, and any area of life you wish to excel in. By harnessing the potential of new AI technology, and better understanding its limitations, you can use AI to significantly enhance your performance and potential.
In November 2022, a revolutionary new tool was made available to everyone with an internet connection at no cost. A generative form of language-based artificial intelligence – known as ChatGPT – entered the world and was taken up by 100 million people more quickly than any other product in history.
ChatGPT represents a new generation of AI – one in which AI technology functions as co-intelligence. This means that rather than following more procedural and repetitive processes, as previous iterations of AI have, ChatGPT emulates human thinking patterns. Its generative, flexible functionality is transforming not only how we humans approach work, it’s also having a profound impact on how quickly complex tasks are achieved – in some cases increasing productivity by 60 percent. And this new generative AI isn’t just making its mark on the workplace. Everything from education to entertainment is feeling the effects of artificial intelligence.
No one knows exactly what the future holds, especially as AI continues to outperform expectations and behave in surprising and unanticipated ways. But it’s clear that generative AI has changed the world as we know it, permanently and profoundly.
In this summary, we’ll take a tour through three different aspects of the workplace that are being significantly shaped by AI, so that you can discover how to directly benefit from this extraordinary technology yourself. By understanding the potential and shortcomings of AI, you can embrace it as a powerful tool that will take your own intelligence to previously unreachable heights.
Ready to explore the boundless terrain of the AI frontier? Then let’s get started.
A cast of experts at your disposal
To fully utilize the potential of AI, it’s essential to have a baseline understanding of what it is. There are many different forms of artificial intelligence – including the types that can generate images and videos like deep-fakes. But this summary will focus specifically on one type of AI called large language models – or LLMs. This is the AI that generates language, and is set to enter many of our workplaces in the near future.
LLMs work by analyzing the language patterns found in massive datasets made up of written materials. Through this analysis, AI can then predict a credible response to a question or request that a human might ask it. And because the datasets used to train AI have been written by humans – they are essentially made up of books, papers, and web content – the responses have a compellingly “human” tone to them. This means that when you’re using AI software, you’ll feel like you’re working with another human, rather than a computer or a robot.
So, exactly what kind of personality does AI have?
Well, there are a few qualities that are central to all LLM-based AIs.
First, they’ll consistently surprise you. This is a core difference between the latest generation of AI and its predecessors. Keep in mind that AI is a type of software. Historically, software was designed to reliably adhere to a prescribed pattern, in order to achieve a specific end result. But LLMs don’t work like this. They’re designed to be generative – finding solutions to complex problems and delivering creative outputs. This is one of their core benefits.
However, there’s a major disadvantage to this quality as well. Generative AI is inclined to tell lies, which are known as hallucinations.
An LLM-based AI can’t distinguish between fact and fabrication – it’s simply programmed to look for patterns and deliver innovative and convincing responses. This means that it’s prone to inventing things and presenting them as truth, even if they’re complete fiction. We’ll delve into this more later but it’s important to keep this quirk in mind as you explore how AI can increase the quality of your work activities.
To make up for this shortcoming, AI possesses an enormously beneficial quality – adaptability. As mentioned earlier, working with AI feels very much like communicating with an actual person. But you, as the human, get to tell the AI what kind of persona you want it to have each time you use it. For instance, if you want an LLM to prepare a business report, you could say to it, “You are a highly intelligent and astute business manager who is articulate, persuasive and transparent. Write the executive summary of a business report, based on the input document.” The output your AI delivers will then be in an appropriate tone. Alternatively, you could tell the AI to assume the persona of a hopeless romantic, and ask it to write a poem about sunsets for your beloved.
Essentially, working with AI means that you have an endless array of personalities and experts at your fingertips, all ready and able to present you with what you need, in the style that you need it. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to fully outsource every language-based task to AI – we’ll explore why in the sections ahead – but it does mean that you can learn how to best exploit AI to increase your productivity and performance. In the upcoming sections, we’ll look at how you can do this in various work scenarios.
Your AI muse
When you think of great artists, who do you picture? Most likely true originals, ones who realize unique visions that resonate deeply with humanity.
It’s natural then to wonder how a piece of software could ever replace a human in the realm of creativity. However, this overlooks the crucial role that novelty plays. Novelty arises from combining two or more existing concepts in a new way, like when the Wright brothers mashed up their knowledge of bicycles and birds to develop an airplane. Since AI thrives on finding connections and patterns, it’s a powerful innovator, even when faced with seemingly ludicrous requests, like generating business ideas that combine medieval England with fast food and lava lamps.
Despite this talent, AI does have creative limitations. Typically, its outputs tend to be very similar for every request you make. But this is where you – as the user – come in. By carefully guiding your AI muse with thoughtful, strategic prompts, you can take your creativity to new heights, especially if you’re someone who struggles to come up with innovative ideas to start with. For instance, you could use AI to brainstorm concepts for a new product, or story ideas for blog posts. Based on the outputs, you could choose which ideas to pursue and then tweak your requests, refining concepts further. This is an example of true co-intelligence, where you work with AI software to extend the scope of your capabilities.
Adding to this benefit is the matter of the AI’s persona that we explored earlier. For example, if you need to come up with marketing slogans, you can specify which persona to adopt, and which audience to appeal to. You might tell it, “You are a marketing expert, who generates witty and diverse ideas. Come up with 20 slogans to advertise a new mail-order cakeshop to vegans living in Manchester.” The outputs won’t be brilliant to start with, but there may be a few that spark better options. You can rework these with the AI until you strike gold. And of course, the more adept you become at crafting nuanced prompts, the better the outputs will be.
Tasks that don’t have a definitive answer and where innovation is important are the ones that LLM-based AI excels at, such as writing marketing copy, preparing strategic memos and even drafting performance reviews. At present, and most likely into the future, humans will still need to carefully curate, edit and fact-check these outputs, due to AI’s hallucinatory habits. However, by using AI as a co-creating tool in these tasks, the time needed to complete them can be dramatically reduced without jeopardizing quality.
Your AI colleague
Whenever there’s talk of introducing AI into a workplace, many people understandably get nervous. Will this brilliant and captivating new software mean mass redundancies? Will it make some jobs obsolete?
There’s no doubt that AI will impact the way many roles are performed. Research by four different teams into over 1000 professions found that there’s some crossover with AI capabilities in almost every job. Unless you’re a dancer or an athlete, AI can almost certainly do some of what you do.
It’s not all bad news though. A cross-over doesn’t mean AI can completely replace you, because jobs are nuanced and exist within larger workplace and economic systems. For example, being a college professor – which ranks 22 on the list of jobs with the most AI overlap – involves teaching, writing, researching, reporting, and supporting students in their long-term aspirations. AI can certainly assist with the less glamorous and mundane aspects of this job, like identifying relevant source materials. In doing so, it can free the professor up to focus on more meaningful work, like tasks that need true critical thinking.
There’s also the question of what types of work humans would entrust to AI, especially given its inability to distinguish fact from fiction. And despite its apparent possession of human emotional qualities – due to the human-made datasets that have trained it – AI remains a piece of non-sentient software. So, you probably wouldn’t want your child’s teacher to be replaced by AI any time soon.
Where does this leave you and your job then, assuming you’re not a ballerina or a gymnast?
Well, let’s first take a look at another shortcoming of AI – one that will help keep all of us in a job.
In an experiment run in conjunction with Boston Consulting Group in 2023, 800 management consultants were divided into two groups – one that would use AI assistance and one that wouldn’t. Each participant was given several work-related tasks to perform in a set period of time. The study found that AI-assisted participants delivered higher quality and more creative work in a shorter time span, compared to the “human-only” participants. However, they were typically copying and pasting the AI outputs without editing or reference checking them. This meant that for tasks that required critical thinking and evaluation to ensure accuracy, only around 65 percent of AI-assisted participants answered correctly, compared to 84 percent from the “human” group.
AI is a brilliant tool generally but it can quickly lull users into becoming complacent. The more faith we have in AI, the lower our overall performance can become. Because of this, AI must be kept in context as a tool that creates efficiencies – much like a carpenter might use a power drill – rather than a stand-in for a human mind. The key is to learn how to master this tool effectively, and not assume it’ll do the work for us. That is true co-intelligence.
To successfully collaborate with your AI work colleague, you’ll need to analyze the nature of your work activities and make informed decisions about what tasks can be delegated to AI, what to collaborate on, and what should remain solely under the direction of your capable human brain.
Your AI mentor
Let’s step back in time now, in order to explore a workplace of the future. Take a moment to think about the early days of your career. Regardless of where you were working, you would’ve spent a lot of time being trained and mentored, while performing the mundane tasks reserved for the uninitiated. Being at the bottom of the pecking order is never much fun, but you would’ve acquired company knowledge and gained expertise that served you in later years.
Now, think about the tasks that were entrusted to you in those early days. They were likely activities like organizing meetings, taking notes, and assisting with correspondence. With the exception of doing the coffee-run, AI will soon routinely perform all of these duties. And it will no doubt assist with higher-level activities too – ones typically carried out by early-career professionals.
So, where does this leave the next generation of workers? How will they become experts in their fields, if AI denies them on-the-job learning?
As AI becomes more integrated into the workplace, critical thinking skills and specialized knowledge are what will keep humans relevant. For instance, an educator might use AI to generate a curriculum, but they’ll still need to evaluate and refine what the AI produces, based on their detailed pedagogical knowledge and an understanding of their specific learning environment.
This means that even though AI can easily regurgitate information for us, the next generation of professionals will still need to acquire that knowledge for themselves. Because – unlike AI – humans possess long-term memory. And that vast library of knowledge that exists in our brains is what helps us assess the validity of AI outputs.
Luckily, AI can assist our future experts in gaining the skills they need, even if it’s no longer available through on-the-job learning. Deliberate and strategic practice is what makes an individual excel, rather than hours spent simply repeating a task. It’s here that LLMs can be particularly useful, by assuming the persona of a personal mentor.
Say, for instance, you’re an aspiring architect who’s secured an entry-level position at a studio. To help your professional development, you appoint yourself a mentor – one that’s an AI-driven architectural assistant. Each time you create a new design, you ask your AI mentor to provide you with feedback. This allows you to gain real-time constructive criticism that might otherwise have only been delivered during your weekly one-on-one with your manager. As a result of your AI mentor, your pace of learning accelerates dramatically, advancing your career at an unprecedented rate.
While AI hasn’t quite reached this level of development yet, it certainly will. In the meantime, you can input your ideas into AI and ask it to provide you with feedback. And as we’ve explored, this feedback can be delivered to you through myriad points of view: the wise lecturer, the cutting critic, even the adoring fan if your ego needs a boost. By leveraging your intelligence with AI, your potential will become boundless.
Conclusion
In this summary to Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick, you’ve learned that generative AI is a powerful tool that enables us to vastly improve our performance. Not only does it allow us to work more efficiently, it also supercharges our creativity when used as a collaborative partner. This potential will continue to increase as AI technology evolves.
While many tech experts have valid concerns about the risks AI poses – such as security threats and disinformation – there’s no doubt that AI brings with it significant benefits, like the potential to rapidly drive scientific research and solve complex, global challenges. And of course, it delivers extraordinary value to the workplace in the form of higher productivity and innovative problem-solving. As AI becomes a ubiquitous tool in the majority of professions, it will transform how we work forever.
Ethan Mollick is an associate professor who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A startups expert, Mollick has penned several renowned management papers, as well as authoring the book The Unicorn’s Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups.