Welcome to the Co-Intelligence Book Club guide!
This guide is designed to support our campus community as we explore Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick.
Mollick argues that modern AI, especially generative tools like large language models, shouldn’t be feared or dismissed, but embraced as collaborators. He outlines a set of guiding principles for working alongside AI, for example: “invite it to the table,” “be the human in the loop,” “treat it like a person — but with defined role,” and “assume this is the worst AI you’ll ever use.” The book is a practical, thoughtful playbook for using AI as a tool to amplify human creativity, productivity, and judgment — while staying aware of its limitations. The goal is to move beyond apprehension and toward a proactive understanding of how to use AI as a partner in teaching, research, and professional development.
Inside this guide, you’ll find discussion questions, supplementary readings, multimedia resources, and opportunities to reflect on how AI is influencing higher education, the workplace, and our daily lives. Everyone is welcome to the table! This guide aims to help you engage more deeply with the book’s ideas and with one another.
Something new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick immediately understood what ChatGPT meant: after millions of years on our own, humans had developed a kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even replace, human thinking. Through his writing, speaking, and teaching, Mollick has become one of the most prominent and provocative explainers of AI, focusing on the practical aspects of how these new tools for thought can transform our world.
In Co-Intelligence, Mollick urges us to engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. He assesses its profound impact on business and education, using dozens of real-time examples of AI in action. Co-Intelligence shows what it means to think and work together with smart machines, and why it's imperative that we master that skill.
Mollick challenges us to utilize AI's enormous power without losing our identity, to learn from it without being misled, and to harness its gifts to create a better human future. Wide ranging, hugely thought-provoking, optimistic, and lucid, Co-Intelligence reveals the promise and power of this new era.
From the author: Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Rowan Fellow, and Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the effects of artificial intelligence on work, entrepreneurship, and education. His academic research has been published in leading journals, and his work on AI is widely applied, leading him to be named one of TIME Magazine’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence. Ethan also writes to a wider audience about AI, including in his book, Co-Intelligence, which was a New York Times bestseller and a best book of the year from The Economist and Financial Times.
He has focused on the ways in which AI and simulations can transform classroom education, leading to him being named MBA Professor of the Year in Poets and Quants. In addition to his research and teaching, Ethan is the Co-Director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton, which build prototypes and conduct research to discover how AI can help humans thrive while mitigating risks. Prior to his time in academia, Ethan co-founded a startup company, and he advises numerous organizations.
Mollick received his PhD and MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
The Faculty Center for Learning Innovation (FCLI) welcomes all faculty to the spring 2026 book club: "Co-Intelligence- Living and Working with AI" by Ethan Mallick.
Participants will meet weekly via Zoom from March 23-April 24. Register here!
The meeting schedule will be decided soon! Check back again soon for updates!
Contact: Stephanie Long: stephanie.long@austincc.edu
Faculty Center for Learning Innovation (FCLI)
Contact: Janey Flanagan, janey.flanagan@austincc.edu