Ethan Mollick
In plain wordsAn American management professor at Wharton whose experiments and popular writing on how people use AI at work introduced ideas such as the 'jagged frontier'.
American professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, innovation and the effects of AI on work. With Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and colleagues he ran a 2023 field experiment with Boston Consulting Group consultants using GPT-4GPT-4, prop. n.: OpenAI's 2023 language model, a big step up from the one behind the first ChatGPT. It scored well on many professional and academic exams and could also read images., which found large gains in speed and quality on tasks inside AI's capability frontier but more errors on a task outside it — a pattern they named the 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 distinguished users who divide work with AI (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.) from those who interweave it (cyborgs). His widely read newsletter One Useful Thing and his book 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI' (2024), which popularized co-intelligenceco-intelligence, n.: Ethan 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., encourage people to learn AI's strengths and weaknesses by using it directly. He co-directs Wharton's generative-AI research lab.
Related
- 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.
- co-intelligenceco-intelligence, n.: Ethan 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.
- 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 intelligencejagged intelligence, n.: The uneven pattern of AI abilities: today's systems can solve very hard problems yet fail at some a child could manage, so their skills form a spiky profile rather than a smooth one.
- 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.
- task exposuretask exposure, n.: A measure of how much of a job's work AI could, in principle, do or speed up. High exposure means many of the job's tasks are within AI's reach, not that the job will vanish.
Sources
- Dell'Acqua, F., McFowland, E., Mollick, E. R. et al. (2023). Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality. Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013.
- Mollick, E. (2024). Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio.