Wharton AI Researcher: If AI Froze Today, It Would Still Rewrite Work
Into the Impossible With Brian KeatingShow Notes
Forecasters gave AI under 2% odds of helping solve a millennium-level math problem by September 2026. It happened. Ethan Mollick has been measuring what AI actually does to real work with field experiments, not forecasts, and his answer is not what most people expect. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.
Mollick runs the Generative AI Lab at Wharton. He is the author of Co-Intelligence and Coexistence, his new book on navigating a world where AI tools are already good enough to change almost all intellectual work, even if progress stopped today.
The conversation covers the jagged frontier: why AI solved a math olympiad before it could count the Rs in strawberry, what it means that roles blur when everyone on a team starts using AI, and what four human advantages still hold an edge when a model can already write a publishable paper. It also covers what happens when your kids tell you that you sound like Claude.
What you’ll hear:
What centaur, cyborg, and conjurer work actually look like in a real academic lab
Why brainstorming was considered a bad idea shortly after it was invented and what that means for working with AI
Why Mollick reduced em dashes in his new book and what that tells you about living alongside these models
What co-evolution might look like if the escalator keeps moving
“If we just had the models we have right now, that’s enough to change almost all of human work in the next ten years. It’s good enough.” — Ethan Mollick
CHAPTERS
00:00 AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot.
03:14 The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry
06:30 Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency
09:44 Escalator or eschaton?
16:02 Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it?
23:46 The labs keep AI in English. Here is why.
32:28 Roles blur. Everyone does everything now.
36:42 My kids say I sound like Claude. They might be right.
38:12 AI found errors in his sources that his fact-checkers missed
46:34 What to do before giving a child access to AI
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Featured Guest:
Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X: https://x.com/emollick?lang=en
Coexistence (book and site): https://co-existence.ai/
One Useful Thing (Substack): https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un
Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com
Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast
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