There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from reading a good book that wasn't written for you. Ethan Mollick's Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI produced exactly that feeling, and it became the starting point for a review conversation with Andrew Maynard on Modem Futura.
The book picks up where Mollick's 2024 Co-Intelligence left off. That book framed AI as a collaborator, with humans at the center and chatbots as helpers. This one turns to coexistence with systems that are sometimes, but not always, better than we are. The chapters are short and the tone is warm and generous, and Mollick is candid about what confuses him, which makes the book a useful counterweight to the faux-certainty that saturates so much public talk about AI.
The case for a gentle book
Andrew's argument is that accessibility is the contribution. Most people meet AI through a chat window or a pop-up in a familiar app. They need a guide they trust more than a technical download, and a slim book that gets read does more good than a definitive one that doesn't.
The case for going deeper
My own reading kept snagging on ideas the book raises and then leaves behind. Mollick's advice to evaluate AI output is sound, but evaluation depends on expertise and judgment built through effort, which is precisely the friction AI tools are designed to remove. His four human advantages (deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency) offer a helpful starting map, yet each opens onto long traditions of scholarship, from embodied cognition to aesthetics, that readers will need to find elsewhere. The book is at its best on work, where Mollick treats jobs as bundles of tasks rather than single units a machine can take. That lens clarifies a great deal, even if it can't settle what happens to people whose bundles are small, or who are caught in the years between old work disappearing and new work arriving.
What a book is for now
The most interesting question the book raised sits just outside its pages. Mollick's book website includes a version written for AI agents reading on behalf of humans. If AI becomes an author's most attentive reader and summaries replace reading for many people, the lasting value of a book like this may lie in the voice itself: the doubt, the self-questioning, the sense of walking alongside someone who is still figuring it out. That voice does not survive summarization well.
So read it, especially if the pace of AI has left you disoriented, and treat it as a set of starting points rather than a destination. Then pick an island and go deeper.
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