Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier

The short essay that gave the AI-at-work debate its two most useful metaphors. Reporting a large field experiment he ran with colleagues at Boston Consulting Group, Mollick describes the "jagged frontier": AI is startlingly good at some tasks and startlingly bad at neighboring ones, with no visible border between them. Consultants using AI finished more work, faster, at higher quality — but on a task deliberately chosen to sit outside the frontier, AI users did worse, trusting the machine into error. The winners worked as "centaurs" (dividing labor with the AI) or "cyborgs" (weaving it into everything).

Read it first among the work-and-jobs pieces: it is ten minutes long, grounded in one of the best experiments run on AI and professional work, and it gives you the vocabulary the rest of the debate now runs on. Its warning — that AI's uneven abilities can make skilled people worse when they stop checking — is the practical heart of the whole subject.