Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence

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Two years after publishing 'Co-Intelligence,' Wharton professor Ethan Mollick is releasing a follow-up titled 'Co-Existence' (October 20), written in response to the rapid shift from cooperative chatbot AI to autonomous agents capable of outperforming humans in specific domains. The catalyst is concrete: a recent study found coding agents led to 17x more code being written, while Anthropic reported AI now writes 80% of its code with developers shipping 8x more. Mollick argues that what is happening in software development will spread to other fields — creating a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than humans. His own writing process illustrates the jagged frontier: he wrote the content himself (citing reader expectations and the authenticity contract), but used AI heavily for research, brainstorming, and structure — while finding AI poorly suited to long-form narrative. The book will address how to thrive alongside AI that outcompetes in some domains but not others. The framing is significant for practitioners: the 'co-intelligence' era of prompting chatbots is giving way to a model where humans must make strategic decisions about when to defer to AI and when to lead — a fundamentally different relationship than 2024's chatbot workflows.