Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI

by Ethan Mollick

Learning any skill and mastering any domain requires rote memorization, careful skills building, and purposeful practice,

The issue is that in order to learn to think critically, problem-solve, understand abstract concepts, reason through novel problems, and evaluate the AI’s output, we need subject matter expertise.

Experts become experts through deliberate practice,6 which is much harder than merely repeating a task multiple times. Instead, deliberate practice requires serious engagement and a continual ratcheting up of difficulty.

It also requires a coach, teacher, or mentor who can provide feedback and careful instruction, and push the learner outside their comfort zone.

The process is much less fun than Sophie’s experience, because Naomi’s challenges escalate with her skill, making sure she is always facing some degree of difficulty.

In our study of Boston Consulting Group, where previously the gap between the average performances of top and bottom performers was 22 percent, the gap shrank to a mere 4 percent once the consultants used GPT-4.