“You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving.”

-Ethan Mollick

I’ll confess that when I started hearing about Ethan Mollick in every AI podcast, I thought his last name was “Mollusk.” Sorry Professor!

According to Mollick himself (an associate professor at Wharton): “I have worked with a lot of different organizations (from startups to government agencies), co-founded a technology company, and have a mysterious past.” According to the Internet, Mollick attended Harvard and MIT and has published a number of papers on technology and innovation, increasing diversity in the start-up world, and how to get AI to consider a greater diversity of ideas. So I believe both that he knows what he’s talking about and has humanity’s best interests at heart.

That can be hard to do with AI, which some people fear will end civilization, or at least take their jobs. With those fears in mind, Mollick has written Co-Intelligence about learning how to work with and alongside AI in order to build a better future that still retains its essential human component. This book is a great place to start if you’ve never worked with AI before (and even if you never plan to, it helps to know–people who don’t drive still understand some basic rules of the road). It goes through a lot of topics and shows actual examples without veering into overly technical or overly patronizing. It’s also a book I think will outlast some of its contemporaries, as it has enough theory to be more evergreen than literature that discusses specific current limitations of specific current tools.

This one had a long wait at my library, both for the print and audio book, so check it out soon!