Short Thoughts

Ethan Mollick writes that our relationship with AI is shifting, from being a partner we create with to the AI performing the work itself, On Working with Wizards. This aligns with the pursuit of AI agents, 2025 being dubbed the year of the agent. While Mollick doesn’t explicitly discuss agents, he uses the term “wizards” to describe a similar concept. He calls them wizards because:

Magic gets done, but we don’t always know what to do with the results

…wizards don’t want my help and work in secretive ways that even they can’t explain.

This presents two important challenges. First, we lose, or never develop, the skill to evaluate what was produced. We lose ground, and so we are forced to trust more. As Mollick states:

every time we hand work to a wizard, we lose a chance to develop our own expertise, to build the very judgment we need to evaluate the wizard’s work.

But what I found especially striking is that throughout time, when we did not understand something, it was considered magic. Science came along and brought a method of understanding of how things work. Technology replaced magic. Is this direction now reversing? Are we losing our understanding, is magic returning? Mollick writes:

The paradox of working with AI wizards is that competence and opacity rise together. We need these tools most for the tasks where we’re least able to verify them. It’s the old lesson from fairy tales: the better the magic, the deeper the mystery.

This is a shocking realization. While many would push back against this analogy, it seems to be at least partially accurate. It raises a pressing question: Why are we so willing to trade our understanding and accept the magic in this context?