If you want to have your own writing, right, you're going to need to spend some time making sure that you're writing on your own, even if AI is more efficient, because it does a very good job at all those things, but it just won't be your job. So I think that that is the big trade-off here.
Welcome to the Ripple Effect, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the minds of Wharton faculty. I'm your host, Dan Loney, and in each episode, we'll be diving deep into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton professors have conducted and exploring how their findings resonate with the world today.
Well, now that we have artificial intelligence in our lives on a pretty much daily basis, the next step of what seems to be the question is how to coexist with the technology that at times might be smarter than us. That's a question that is brought up in the new book, Coexistence, by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, which looks at the next phase of that relationship with AI, and Ethan joins us right now to discuss the book. Hi, Ethan. How are you, sir?
Excellent. Thanks for having me.
Thank you. And I guess we should start out with the fact that you incorporated the use of AI in writing this book, correct?
Right. I mean, but very carefully, right? So the whole idea is being very deliberate about how to use it. So I write all my own first drafts, for example, but I get feedback, I use it for research, so you have to be careful about what you're using it for. I also use it for fun throughout the book as well.
I think part of the issue that some people have is that AI is seemingly always changing and adapting and seeing new versions come out with ChatGPT. And there's probably a concern of AI doing everything for us. But that doesn't seem to be the case, that AI has its place in the overall relationship with humans.
Well, I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head, which is it is not just changing, it's improving. So when I last wrote my last book, Co-Intelligence, that I had to do about four minutes of work with vision percent success rate. It's something like seven weeks of work now, later. So I mean, it doesn't do everything, there's jaggedness, it doesn't, you know, it has issues. But I think it is expanding what it could do, even as there's still a lot of room for humans.
So jaggedness, and being jagged is a word that you use a lot in this book to develop or should say to make us understand the relationship. What does jagged mean in your mind?
So along with my fellow researchers at Harvard and MIT, University of Warwick, we wrote a paper where we looked at the impact of AI on consultants way back in 2023. And we found that AI was good, some stuff you would expect, bad stuff you would expect, and you don't know in advance what that is. So that's the jagged frontier of AI ability. It keeps growing and changing, but that does mean that there is a place for humans where AI fails.
Part of this is the relationship with human beings and what it's going to look like as we move forward, isn't it?
Well, I mean, that's everything, right? The question is, where do we get displaced? Where do we get advantage? And how do these things trade off with each other?
You tackle the use of AI around work, around education and safety. Are those kind of the three most important areas, discussion areas, when we're talking about what we're going to see in the future?
No, this is a general purpose technology. This affects absolutely every aspect of technology, right? And so we can go into micro levels of how we'll change podcasting or how we'll change being a professor. I talk about society overall and changes in how we relate to the internet and relate to each other. So I don't think there's like one area where AI is going to matter. I think it's going to matter absolutely everywhere.
But with those three areas, and I guess safety is one that is talked about a lot, and it's talked a lot about technology in general. How does AI and safety kind of correlate as we move forward?
Well, there's many kinds of safety, right? So often we divide this into existential risk and other kinds of risk. So existential risk is the idea that what if AI murders us all, you know, which there's people worried about and we're probably very underregulated for. And then there's the wider questions in every field. What do you do with cybersecurity? What do I do with CDR and tests? What do we do about, you know, getting bad advice from AI? What do we do about, like, there's a lot of other questions there too. So, you know, the technology's upsides and downsides.
How does the regulatory piece, as you just kind of alluded to, fit into this as we move forward? Because most people believe it's incredibly important.
I mean, we have a general purpose technology that affects everything with substantial risk and substantial upsides. And what guides it to, you know, lower risks and increase the upsides is regulation, right? So we don't have a lot of regulation right now around how AI labs operate. Almost everything is voluntary. And so, you know, but we also have a piecemeal set of regulations that's probably aimed at stuff that is not as critical to assuring AI success. So getting policymaking right is gonna be important, but it's very hard to do given how quickly things are developing.
How should people think about, going off of the title of the book, the coexistence with artificial intelligence as we move forward here?
