co-intelligence
In plain wordsEthan Mollick's term for working and thinking alongside AI as a partner — treating it like a capable but odd colleague whose strengths and blind spots you learn through experience.
A framing of human–AI collaboration in which AI systems are treated as partners in thinking and work — coworker, tutor, coach or creative collaborator — rather than as mere tools or as replacements, with the human supplying judgment, context and accountability. Its popularizer offered working rules: bring AI into every task to discover where it helps; keep a human in the loop; give the AI a defined persona while remembering it is not a person; and assume the current model is the worst one you will ever use. The framing draws on evidence of large but uneven productivity gains (see jagged frontierjagged frontier, n.: The uneven edge of what AI can do: it may excel at some hard tasks yet fail at seemingly easier ones, so how hard a task looks is a poor guide to whether AI can handle it.) and distinguishes collaboration styles such as centaurscentaur, n.: A human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature., who divide tasks between human and machine, and cyborgs, who weave the two together.
Treat it as co-intelligence: let it draft, argue with it, and keep the final call yourself.
Origin
Popularized by Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (April 2024), which grew out of his newsletter One Useful Thing. The word had earlier, unrelated uses, notably Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence Institute (founded in the 1990s) on collective intelligence.
Related
- centaurcentaur, n.: A human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature.
- jagged frontierjagged frontier, n.: The uneven edge of what AI can do: it may excel at some hard tasks yet fail at seemingly easier ones, so how hard a task looks is a poor guide to whether AI can handle it.
- copilotcopilot, n.: An AI assistant built into software that works alongside a person — suggesting code, drafting text or answering questions — while the person stays in charge, like a co-pilot beside the captain.
- human-in-the-loophuman-in-the-loop, adj.: Describes AI systems in which a person checks, corrects or approves the machine's work at key points, rather than letting it act entirely on its own.
- intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds.
- augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own.
Sources
- Mollick, E. (2024). Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin.
Mentioned in
copilotcopilot, n.: An AI assistant built into software that works alongside a person — suggesting code, drafting text or answering questions — while the person stays in charge, like a co-pilot beside the captain., augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own., centaurcentaur, n.: A human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature., intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds., jagged frontierjagged frontier, n.: The uneven edge of what AI can do: it may excel at some hard tasks yet fail at seemingly easier ones, so how hard a task looks is a poor guide to whether AI can handle it., Ethan MollickEthan Mollick, prop. n.: An American management professor at Wharton whose experiments and popular writing on how people use AI at work introduced ideas such as the 'jagged frontier'., extended mindextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would.