What Happens When the World is Built on Stacks of Wizards

Written By Betsy Corcoran

With guest Ethan Mollick

How do you work with a "wizard"? Season two of Future Fluent kicks off with a provocative interview with Ethan Mollick, a professor, writer and deep observer of the fast evolving relationship between artificial intelligence, learning and the future of work. Agentic AI, Mollick observes, is a collection of wizards that collaborate to accomplish tasks--even if we don't exactly understand how they do that. When should we trust wizards? What happens when we don't? And what are the implications for how we learn and teach?

 

Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and examines AI’s effects on work and education. He shares free resources and prompts at the Generative AI Labs at Wharton. He also co-founded and leads Wharton Interactive, an effort to democratize education using games, simulations, and AI. His academic papers have been published in top management journals. CNN, The New York Times, and other leading publications have also covered his research. He has created numerous teaching games on a wide variety of topics. His book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a New York Times best seller.

 

In addition to his academic work, Ethan advises several startups and organizations, and writes the “One Useful Thing” newsletter, with over 50k subscribers. He shares his insights daily with his over 150k Twitter followers and can be found on X, BlueSky, and LinkedIn.

So much to explore!

Want more? Here’s how you can follow Ethan Mollick’s work and check out other references we talk about in this show: 

Betsy Corcoran
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What We've Learned About AI