...we're all discovering this together...
“Nobody knows anything.”
Ethan Mollick
I have learned a lot from Ethan Mollick about how to experiment with AI over the many months since the initial release of ChatGPT. Ethan is a professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He is the author of the new book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. This week I finally got around to watching a talk he gave at the ASU + GSV Summit in April 2024—Co-Intelligence: AI in the Classroom.
After surfing the big AI waves rolling in over the previous few weeks (the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, and Google’s AI releases at I/O), Ethan’s talk was a refreshing 24-minute reality check/grounding. He packs a lot of value and good advice into 24 minutes. As educators, parents, adults who spend time with young people in learning environments, we need role models for living and working with AI. Ethan surely is one, and what I like about him is that he encourages us all to become role models ourselves—experimenting, learning, sharing—each in our own unique way.
I encourage you to set aside the time this week to watch this talk. Then take a look at the prompt library Ethan presents on the last slide, and do your own experiments. Try using the new ChatGPT-4o to explore a topic you’re really interested in from a new angle or two. As Ethan says so well, “…we're all discovering this together so if you're kind of waiting for instructions from above, they're not forthcoming, right? Nobody knows anything.”
Go deeper
Here’s an MIT Open Learning webcast: AI’s Education Revolution: What will it take?
Watch the first 20 mins for a great intro to AI given by David Huttenlocher, Dean of MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and author of The Age of AI. He does some deep thinking in this talk about AI Governance with an underlying theme of “AI collaboration, not substitution.” He is followed by several other speakers. It is a long webcast. At this point, I’ve only watched his talk.
On another note
“I think it’s one of the nice things with humans. We’re really kind if we get the chance.”
—Maria "Vildhjärta" Westerberg, artist and poet
Here’s a really lovely short film: Rewilding A Forest | Artist and Poet Maria "Vildhjärta" Westerberg (18 min). Watch it with family and friends.
It shows the power of a few human beings.
This film is part of a series called Something Beautiful for the World.
Be well. A warm welcome to the new subscribers. Thank you for making time to read The Interconnect. I’m glad you’ve found your way here and I hope you stay a while. And please consider sharing this post with family, friends, teachers, and/or colleagues who might appreciate it and put it to work.