“I don’t have help or anything. I organize myself and I receive like 800 messages a day. I’m afraid to look at my to-do list,” says Ethan Mollick (49 years old) and professor at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). just published Co-intelligence (Conecta), on how to better take advantage of artificial intelligence in everyday use. Despite this, managing your schedule remains extremely complicated. Although he recommends using AI as a companion for almost everything, he also believes that we should be careful. Thanks to its presence on social networks, its newsletter and his candid comments, Mollick has become one of the most popular analysts and testers of new generative AI tools.
Ask. How does it feel to be a influencer of AI?
Answer. I hate that description. I’ve been on social media for a long time, and I’m a compulsive sharer. But I don’t accept money from any of the AI companies nor do I do sponsorship deals. I talk to them because I find it interesting. I am a professor with a permanent position, I can say what I want. It’s strange to see companies trying to manipulate me by teaching me their stuff, but I don’t have the infrastructure of a influencer. I worry that that title mixes everything up. There is a difference between those who are public intellectuals, researchers and critics. It would be better if we had more different categories.
Q. He recommends spending three sleepless nights to master the AI.
R. The advice that works best in the book is to spend 10 hours with AI and apply it to everything you do. For some reason, very few take the time to understand these systems.
Q. He doesn’t like to call AI a crutch.
R. The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we depend on a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch learn nothing. It prevents thinking. Instead, using AI as a co-intelligence It is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you engaged.
Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier?
R. Calculators also made us lazier. Why don’t we do calculations by hand anymore? You should now be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts.
Q. Why should we approach artificial intelligence with a strategy?
R. AI does so many things that we need to set limits on what we don’t want to give up. It’s a very strange, general-purpose technology, which means it will affect all kinds of things and we will have to adjust socially. We did a very poor job with the last big social adjustment, social media. This time we have to be more reflective.
Q. Will we be able to do it better than with networks?
R. What gives me some hope with this technology is that, because it is so human-like, it is more natural to work with. Humans already work with intelligent colleagues to solve problems. It will be different if AI becomes a kind of god-machine; but at the current level, where you’re interacting with this thing and it’s glitchy, that’s where it can be useful for it to be somewhat human-like.
Q. In the book he talks about “things that are just mine” in reference to raising children and values. Do those things better outside of AI?
R. There are many moral and ethical decisions. I can’t help much with that, but I think we have to take them. With social media we didn’t make enough decisions about how we wanted to use it. People and many books see AI as something that is imposed on us, and companies are creating AI, but they don’t really know how it is being used or what it is good for. We can make some decisions about that, and I think people tend to see it as a government or business decision, but it’s not just like that.
Q. People already have partners and psychological counselors made of AI.
R. We have lived with a general-purpose technology for many years: the internet. Social media is just one sharp aspect of what the internet has done to society. It’s just an app. Other applications have been dating apps or how we shop. The implications are deep and broad. For example, with the AI voice mode, I don’t want to be his friend, but for some reason I simultaneously find myself justifying myself and being careful when I talk to him. We will have to adapt. I’m confident we can, but people already have connections with AI. Others will have almost religious connections with AI and others will be manipulated. We have to recognize that many things will happen, good and bad; and the more prepared we are for that change, the better.
Q. You have written that “much of the value of using AI comes from people not knowing that you use it.” Why are we afraid of others knowing that we use AI?
R. In organizations there are several layers that monitor whether people use AI. One of them is that if I use AI to do my job, others will think I’m brilliant. You don’t want people to know that you’re actually not that bright, especially since AI is very good at things like writing empathetic emails, and it would be weird for them to know that empathy came from an AI. They also don’t want to show it because they are afraid that you will realize that their work is redundant, or that they will be asked to do more work.
Q. He recently wrote that something is starting to change with the new OpenAI model, ChatGPT-o1.
R. I finished the book a year ago. I needed to have enough vision to intuit where things were going. I wasn’t interested in making six-year predictions or saying whether AI will kill us or save us. My interest was how to work with this thing. One of the things that I mention, but that wasn’t as important in the previous generation of AI and that I think will be key in the next year or two, is this idea of autonomy and agents. It is the beginning of an AI that will carry out processes autonomously, without our help. I don’t think that will fundamentally change how we work with AI, but perhaps we will go to models that come back and ask you questions when they have problems. There is something valuable about being questioned. It’s something we do in all the AI tools we build for learning: there has to be a round trip, and the o1 model doesn’t really do that. He doesn’t ask. That’s what worries me.
Q. He likes one-on-one tutors with AI for education. Are we going there, after what you call “the apocalypse of homework”?
R. The AI tutor is one piece of the puzzle in the transformation of education. I’ve worked in interactive education before generative AI, and there are things about classrooms that we know for sure are changing, regardless of AI: lectures are no longer a good idea. Active learning is better, where students have to participate. Personalization is better. In the classroom, a small group of students usually participate and others get lost. We are not teaching correctly. In a way, master classes have their value, they are not a disaster. We have a way of teaching that has evolved over 200 years and it is fine. The homework apocalypse gives us an opportunity that not all of us are going to take advantage of, but we should rethink learning.
Q. How can we take advantage of that opportunity?
R. Interactive classrooms instead of lectures are a better way to learn. We have not adopted them because it is easier to continue giving talks and homework. We have the opportunity to be more reflective, and AI tutors are part of that reflection, because they help fill knowledge gaps. Class time should be used to work on problems together. We can’t continue doing what we did before.
Q. What are some of the biggest misunderstandings about AI?
R. People are divided between those who are crazy about AI and those who are nervous or anxious. Each group has its own myths. For non-adopters, one of the biggest myths is that AI doesn’t do anything original and all you get is content copied from others. And that is not so. The AI is built as a complex physical model for all languages and uses those rules to create new material based on its training. Yes it is original. That is one of the big misunderstandings. The other is to compare it with Google. It’s worse at the things Google does well, but better at many other things Google doesn’t do.
Q. He says the best experts of the future will be those who leverage AI the most. Are people waiting to use AI making a mistake?
R. I get it, it’s disturbing technology. People are going crazy. They try three sleepless nights and flee in terror. It is perceived as an essential threat to many careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, at first you think, “Oh no!”, but then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before; and, at least for the next generations, it is not going to replace you, even if technologists say it will. We need to separate ourselves from the noise of Silicon Valley. On the one hand, they are absolutely right: it is a miraculous and incredible technology that emulates thought; but, on the other hand, they don’t understand anything about our work.
