Co-Intelligence

To make the most of this relationship, you must establish a clear and specific AI persona, defining who the AI is and what problems it should tackle.

Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, published a paper in 1984 called “The 2 Sigma Problem.”1 In this paper, Bloom reported that the average student tutored one-to-one performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a conventional classroom environment. This means that the average tutored student scored higher than 98 per

We need to push the AI from an average answer to a high-variance, weird one. We can do this again by telling the AI who it is. Force it to give you less likely answers, and you will find more original combinations. Imagine you are opening a coffee shop. You might want to ask: You are an expert at problem-solving and idea generation. When asked to s

Amara’s Law, named after futurist Roy Amara, says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

We have invented a kind of alien mind. But how do we ensure the alien is friendly? That is the alignment problem.

Echo chambers of other similarly minded people21 are already a common occurrence. But soon we will each have our own perfect echo chambers. It’s possible that these personalized AIs might ease the epidemic of loneliness22 that ironically affects our ever more connected world—just as the internet and social media connected dispersed subcultures. On

we need to be conscious about the tasks we are giving AI, so as to take advantage of its strengths and our weaknesses. We want to be more efficient while doing less boring work, and to remain the human in the loop while also addressing the value of AI. To do this well, we need a framework, where we divide our tasks into categories that are more or

Principle 1: Always invite AI to the table.

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. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you—o