Exploring AI's "Jagged Frontier"

This week is the first edition looking at Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Today, we explore how we can leverage the non-linear progress of AI to give ourselves an unfair advantage…

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

🎯 The Idea In a Nutshell:

• AI’s progress is rapid, but uneven; its strengths and weaknesses are not always intuitive.

• Mollick calls it the “jagged frontier,” and the only way to grasp it is to experience it directly.

• You should be aggressively seeking ways to incorporate AI into as many facets of your life as possible.

• There is no manual for how to “AI-proof” your life; the rules are being written in real time.

• But those who possess a deep grasp of how exactly the jagged frontier is unfolding will hold an unfair advantage.

📝 Diving Deeper

The fact that AI is a big deal hardly bears repeating. And you don’t have to pay particularly close attention to recognize how quickly profound changes are coming.

What’s less obvious is how exactly progress is unfolding. It’s not linear.

For all its power, AI is not magic. Getting it to perform on certain tasks is a breeze. Others can feel like pulling teeth. Either the technology isn’t there yet, or the time you have to spend wrestling with it to get good results is more trouble than it’s worth.

Mollick calls this the “jagged frontier.” Basically, AI’s rollout is fast and messy. And it’s not always obvious where the technology will excel and where it will fall flat. To build an intuition for this, you have to experience it yourself. 

This means going beyond the basics. For all the hype around AI, many of us have barely gotten off the starting blocks — using AI to come up with a meal plan, crafting a marketing campaign, or drafting an email to a difficult customer, for example. These are all valid use cases. They’re also table stakes.

It is not an exaggeration to say that AI will touch every facet of our lives to some degree. New use cases and paradigms will range from minor new conveniences to earth-shattering upheavals. Getting ahead of this is key.

Barring any legal or ethical barriers, Mollick argues that we should be aggressively seeking ways to fold AI into everything we do. There is no handbook for how to AI-proof your life. The rules are being written in real time. But one thing is certain: Tremendous leverage will accrue to those who actively explore the jagged frontier.

👉 Why it matters:

• It’s easy to view AI as monolithic, but there’s power in understanding the details.

• Grasping the nuances lets us spot risks and opportunities specific to our unique situation before anyone else.

• Each of us has a rare opportunity to become a leading expert in how to apply AI to our craft.

🤔 Prompts for Reflection

• How aggressively are you incorporating AI into your day-to-day?

• Are you closely monitoring progress to ensure you’re staying ahead of trends?

• What’s one specific way you could lean in harder to applying AI in your work?

Make today impactful.
~Jason