Co-Intelligence

I asked AI to: Find me business ideas that would incorporate fast food, patent 6,604,835 B2 [which turned out to be for a lava lamp that included bits of crystal], and 14th century England.

One small study of undergraduates found that 66 percent of men and 25 percent of women choose to painfully shock themselves rather than sit quietly with nothing to do for 15 minutes.10 Boredom doesn’t just lead us to hurt ourselves; 18 percent of bored people killed worms when given a chance (only 2 percent of non-bored people did). Bored parents a

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

Here’s a secret: we have long known how to supercharge education; we just can’t quite pull it off. 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 conven

many of these biases come from our being stuck in our own minds. Now we have another (strange, artificial) co-intelligence we can turn to for help. AI can assist us as a thinking companion to improve our own decision-making, helping us reflect on our own choices (rather than simply relying on the AI to make choices for us). We are in a world where

You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever wordplay. You try not to repeat themes or ideas. Come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop, make them different from each other, and make them cleve

When the AI is very good, humans have no reason to work hard and pay attention. They let the AI take over instead of using it as a tool, which can hurt human learning, skill development, and productivity. He called this “falling asleep at the wheel.”

Until AIs become very good at a range of Automated Tasks, the most valuable way to use AI at work is to become a Centaur or Cyborg.

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