Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel; what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far. And remember, AI is only going to get better at guiding us, rather than requiring us to guide it. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer.

This doesn’t mean

Now we can try applying some of these other techniques: Think this through step by step: come up with good analogies for an AI tutor. First, list possible analogies. Second, critique the list and add three more analogies. Next, create a table listing pluses and minuses of each. Next, pick the best and explain it.

But there are already signs that AI can help. Research has successfully demonstrated that it is possible to correctly determine the most promising directions in science by analyzing past papers with AI, ideally combining human filtering with the AI software. And other work has found that AI shows considerable promise autonomously conducting scienti

Our new AIs have been trained on a huge amount of our cultural history and are using it to provide us with text and images in response to our queries. But there is no index or map to what they know and where they might be most helpful. Thus, we need people who have deep or broad knowledge of unusual fields to use AI in ways that others cannot, deve

Some were assigned to use AI and some were not. The results were nothing short of astonishing. Participants who used ChatGPT saw a dramatic reduction in their time on tasks, slashing it by a whopping 37 percent. Not only did they save time, but the quality of their work also increased as judged by other humans. These improvements were not limited t

I am only human, and in writing this book, I often found myself stuck. In previous books, that could mean a single sentence or paragraph would block hours of writing, as I used my frustration as an excuse to take a break and walk away until inspiration struck. With AI, that was no longer a problem. I would become a Cyborg and tell the AI: I am stuc

I’m proposing a pragmatic approach: treat AI as if it were human because, in many ways, it behaves like one. This mindset, which echoes my “treat it like a person” principle of AI, can significantly improve your understanding of how and when to use AI in a practical, if not technical, sense.

AI excels at tasks that are intensely human. It can write,

Imagine introducing high-quality AI tutors into the flipped classroom model. These AI-powered systems have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience for students and make flipped classrooms even more effective. They provide personalized learning, where AI tutors can tailor instruction to each student’s unique needs while contin

So how should we use AI to help generate ideas? Fortunately, the papers, and other research on innovation, have some good suggestions. When you do include AI in idea generation, you should expect that most of its ideas will be mediocre. But that’s okay—that’s where you, as a human, come into the equation. You are looking for ideas that spark inspir

For example, we know that in-class lectures are not the most effective way to teach and that topics need to be interwoven together in order for students to retain what they know. Unhappily for students, however, research shows that both homework and tests are actually remarkably useful learning tools.