REVIEW: Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick (2 Stars)

I wanted to love this book -- and while it's funny and humorous, it's basically a long blog post or online message board discussion. The conversations with AI are amusing - but not substantive.

The author talks about anthropomorphization -- and dismisses people talking to their pets as the same as talking to their cars or other inanimate objects. And yet - he wants to make a case for AI being some kind of "alien mind" - when he's making a stronger case for it as a mirror of our own expectations.

Throughout the book he talks about how AI is filling in the most probable or likely response -- so if you say "To be or not ___ " it's going to say "to be" since that is the most probable. If you say "The alien ate a banana because ___" you'll get more variety every time you ask the question because it's not a topic or subject reflected in the AI training corpus.

AI is just another way for us to summarize back all the stuff we've written/created with words or images -- to us. It's more like a fun-house mirror than an intelligence.

My cats are more intelligent and capable of communication than an AI -- so where does this leave us?

Humans want to imagine that AI is more intelligent because it sounds like us and tells us what we want to hear. AI is very conformist - it will rewrite and reshape your thoughts and ideas to make them more appealing based upon the corpus of information it has already digested. It will align your communication to meet the greatest common denominator. You can ask it questions and it will tell you to analyze "Heart of Darkness" vis a vis Jane Austen's marriage plots -- and come up with some reasonably interesting points based on what it expects are most probable points from what we have already fed it. NOT because it's thinking of these things. Rather, AI acts as a sophisticated tool for summarizing and regurgitating information in a manner that aligns with human expectations.

I'd like to see a deeper exploration of AI's capabilities and limitations beyond surface-level interactions examining the fundamental nature of AI and its true intelligence compared to human and even animal cognition.

The author quotes someone who says that humans are just a historical point in the evolution of "intelligence" as if that is an autonomous being or subject. I'd contend that it is not -- we aren't merely vessels for "intelligence." There's no hierarchy of value based on "intelligence."

However, I do appreciate the author's optimism that AI will remove the boring/redundant tasks from human labor and his call to consider universal basic income and healthcare as real needs as humans move toward an era where we should focus our attention on tasks and activities that are more intrinsically rewarding to us and which do not require a 40 hour (or more) work week.

The mythical 4 day work week has been promised for decades, the practicalities of achieving a reducing "full time" work weeks remain uncertain. Striking a balance between dystopian and utopian visions of AI's impact on society is crucial for informed decision-making.

Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

RATING: 2 stars