AI as a Partner : critical review of the book Co-Intelligence : living and working with AI by Ethan Mollick

Abstract

""We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run¹." This sentence alone sheds light on why we often seem to be caught off guard by changes wrought by technologies that at first seem innocuous. Roy Amara’s quote has even more resonance in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Who hasn’t been both amazed and perplexed by ChatGPT’s capabilities, while struggling to imagine its longterm impact? This dichotomy between immediate excitement and future uncertainty perfectly characterizes our current relationship with AI.

This is precisely the context for Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. After three sleepless nights induced by his first use of ChatGPT, the author, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, begins an in-depth reflection on our inevitable coexistence with this new form of intelligence. According to Mollick, we should learn to live and work alongside generative AI, a tool capable of making complex connections, using with the most instinctive thing we have: language. Mollick thus attempts to answer a crucial question: what will this world of co-intelligence with AI look like, and how can we make the most of it without losing our essence?" -- AQPC