ApsûVoyage of a Thousand Books
Chart of the Sea of Books
Drag or zoom the chart. Tap an island to go ashore.
Who is this book for?
- People who already use AI tools like ChatGPT at work every day but aren't sure how to use them properly
- People who worry AI will replace their jobs and want to understand first what it can and can't do
- Teachers, managers, and parents who want to know how AI will change learning and the workplace
- AI beginners who want a set of simple principles rather than a pile of technical terms
Who is the author?
- Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who heads Wharton's Generative AI Lab and studies innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI's effects on work
- After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, he experimented with it extensively himself, calling the shock "three sleepless nights," and began requiring students to use AI in class
- The book's English title is Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, published in 2024
Other BooksOne Useful Thing (newsletter with ongoing commentary on AI)
Reading notes
🔒 Arrive at Lofoten and visit the Norwegian Lundehund to unlock this
Sail to LofotenAn Alien Mind Wearing a Human Mask
Mollick reminds readers at the outset that generative AI is completely different from the software we know. Traditional programs execute pre-written steps, whereas large language models learn the statistical relationships among words and concepts from vast data such as books, articles, websites, conversation records, and code, and then "predict the next word that is most likely to follow and also satisfies your needs."
With the attention mechanism and the Transformer architecture, it can write text that is coherent and fits the context, and even imitate human tone, humor, and empathy. The author describes it as "an alien wearing a human mask": it looks like a person talking, but it doesn't actually think or feel, merely producing the statistically most suitable response.
For this reason, AI often shows abilities that even its developers did not expect, and at the same time makes errors in places that seem simple.
The Jagged Frontier of Ability
The Alignment Problem and Ethics
Four Principles for Working with AI
AI as Coworker: Centaurs and Cyborgs
AI as Creative Partner, Tutor, and Coach
Expertise Won't Become Obsolete, and Novices Benefit Most
Four Futures
Navigators' bottles Reader reviews
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Shang
Shang's books
Voyager's Guide
This world
The Sea of Books has 16 real islands, one for each subject. Every building on an island is a book.
What you can do now
- Tap an island on the chart to go ashore
- Tap a building to read the notes on that book
- Meet Shang, the Navigator
Coming soon
- Chapter 2: register as a voyager, sail your ship, collect building badges, send message bottles
- Chapter 4: private chats with other voyagers
Symbols
Navigator's registry
Before you set sail, we'll register your ship.