AI has come for our world, whether we like it or not. In Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick, takes a positive look at what AI could mean for our lives. He explores how to maximize it’s effectiveness for our productivity and dreams of a “better” world where AI lets us get more done with less effort, and we’re rewarded for it with better wages and less working time. In theory we can then explore our creative sides instead of working all the time.
In these final ideas I think Mollick is way off base. Productivity has risen since the 70’s such that we could already have short work weeks and lots of free time. Instead of getting this capitalist owners have taken more percentage of profit into their bank accounts leaving workers struggling to get by. If things continue as they are, I think it’s more likely we have a very rich few, and many who have no work and no money.
While the book was interesting, I don’t feel like Mollick engaged with any serious critiques of AI and how it’s stolen creative content that was copyrighted to then steal work from people. The only glimmer was a few brief mentions of his worry that we’ll loose the “experts” who can judge AI output in their field because we’ll stop hiring Jr people and thus have no apprenticeship pipeline to build experts.
Overall, Mollick seems to have bought into the techno-utopian ideas that all tech is good and somehow magically society will benefit if we let corporations run with their profit centers unchecked.
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