Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

by Ethan Mollick

We often take for granted the systems we use to structure and coordinate work in our organizations. We assume they are natural ways of getting things done. But in reality, they are historical artifacts, shaped by the technological and social conditions of their times.

But, like all work before, they still rely on human capabilities and limitations. Human attention remains finite, our emotions are still important, and workers still need bathroom breaks. The technology changes, but workers and managers are just people.

Boredom is not just boring; it is dangerous in its own way.

In the short term, then, we might expect to see little change in employment (but many changes in tasks), but, as Amara’s Law, named after futurist Roy Amara, says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

This suggests that there is something unique and powerful about the interaction between a tutor and a student that cannot be easily replicated by other means. So it is not surprising that a powerful, adaptable, and cheap personalized tutor is the holy grail of education.

This is the paradox of knowledge acquisition in the age of AI: we may think we don’t need to work to memorize and amass basic skills, or build up a storehouse of fundamental knowledge—after all, this is what the AI is good at. Foundational skills, always tedious to learn, seem to be obsolete. And they might be, if there was a shortcut to being an expert. But the path to expertise requires a grounding in facts.

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.

AI does not need to be catastrophic. In fact, we can plan for the opposite. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about exactly this, a situation he termed a eucatastrophe, so common in fairy tales: “the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ . . . is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.”