It is now clear to us that there is a new form of intelligence on the planet. The people who win in the future will not be the ones who fail to adopt this intelligence, nor the ones who use it as a proxy for their own intelligence.

The ones who win will be the ones who continue to use their individual minds to sharpest effect, while supplementing them with this new intelligence. That’s what I call cointelligence. It was a term coined by Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton, shortly after he initially started playing with ChatGPT.

What is cointelligence in practice? Personally, I do not use AI to write my blog or LinkedIn posts. I do use AI to help create software product websites.

Writing is a fine art, perfected over many millenia, starting from the ancient classics. So is mathematical reasoning, which is the precursor to all other kinds of reasoning. It would be a tragic loss to humanity if human intelligence allows them to be replaced by AI.

The need of the hour is educational programs in high schools and universities, where students participate in “gyms” designed primarily to strengthen the power of their minds by engaging in creative and problem solving activities, using AI as a tool and not a replacement for their thought process.

This can be implemented in practice by the design of ambitious problems which become more tractable with the help of AI, along with curated access to AI.