Ethan Mollick

One ongoing frustration is the lack of effort I see being put towards near-term, achievable crash projects to do good with AI at a national scale, whether those efforts are by the AI labs or by policymakers & NGOs. Some obvious ideas to explore suggested by the data we have so far: universal tutoring to support classroom learning, second opinions on healthcare, financial literacy/scam avoidance, and making government services easy to access. These are hard problems, and I know because over the past 20 years I have worked extensively on building tutoring and financial literacy programs, which were always limited by existing technology. Now, real gains are likely achievable with AI, which should be a big deal. Yes, you would want to do careful design and studies before rolling things out. And yes, those efforts might fail. But, if done right, national programs could lead to big gains in public good for seemingly intractable problems. And they don't require AIs beyond current models to pull off.