PERSON
Ethan Mollick
The Wharton professor who, when generative AI arrived, did the thing almost no one else did—he used it, relentlessly and publicly, for everything he could, and then wrote down honestly what actually happened.
Ethan Mollick is the empiricist the hype era forgot to hire. A professor of management at the Wharton School, he had spent his career studying entrepreneurship and innovation—not imagining technologies from a safe distance, but observing how they actually diffuse through organizations and what they actually do to the people inside them. So when generative AI arrived in 2022, he treated it as a researcher treats a phenomenon: he poured it into his work, his teaching, his writing, and his daily life, and he watched what broke and what bloomed. The result, gathered in his newsletter
One Useful Thing and his 2024 bestseller
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is not a prophecy and not a eulogy but a field report from the seam where human and machine meet—the seam that almost everyone was too busy arguing about the endpoints to bother studying. His central contribution to the cycle is conceptual: the metaphor of the
large language model as an
alien intelligence