army persuasive essay topics

166 Military Essay Topics

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🏆 Hot Military Topics for Discussion

✍️ military essay topics for college, 👍 good military research topics & essay examples, 💡 simple military essay topics, 🎓 most interesting army persuasive essay topics, ❓ military research questions.

• Information Technology Implications for Military
• Interpersonal Communication in the Military
• Military Mindset: Leadership, Discipline, Resilience, and Teamwork
• Military Tactics of Alexander the Great
• Training and Development in Military Units
• Human Resource Competencies in the Military
• The Role of Soft Skills in Military Operations
• Topographic Symbols in Military Maps Symbols in an army map should be easily understood and communicate landscape elements to military personnel, thus making vital contributions to navigation and operations.
• Military Social Worker’s Qualities and Skills This essay describes personal and leadership qualities that need to have in the perfect candidate for being a military social worker.
• Stress in the Military A study conducted by the Careercast.com in 2013 indicated that the military working environment was characterized by numerous stressors.
• Military Bases on Okinawa: Impact on Economy The American military based on the territory of Japan, Okinawa in particular, has a certain impact on the country’s economic and political relations.
• Sexual Harassment and Assault in the Military The marines are extremely negatively disposed towards the presence of female soldiers in their combat formations.
• Justification for the Use of Military Force Military intervention was a feasible alternative for averting external aggression in the past, and it is still the most viable option for fighting global terrorism.
• COVID-19 Impact on Military Supply Chain Management In the military, logistics managers should get and deliver equipment and supplies to troops, which affects national security and is a relevant issue that requires a solution.
• A Stress Management Program for the Military The military authorities should address mental illnesses such as stress due to work conditions to ensure the service members’ holistic well-being.
• Military Diversity: US Army The article focuses on the need and benefits of ensuring cultural and racial diversity, as well as gender balance in the US military.
• Internet-of-Things in the Military and Its Feasibility This paper provides an analysis of the Internet of Military Things functions and a description of its feasibility in the future and its associated costs.
• Egyptian Military Potential Analysis The Egyptian military potential is large compared to many other countries. The country is highly equipped with heavy ground and air techniques.
• Fire Support Planning in Military Fire support planning is an efficient practice aimed at improved cooperation and coordination between all fire teams.
• Napoleon’s Achievements and Military Campaigns Napoleon was one of the greatest men in the history of humanity. Being a brilliant commander, he managed to win a number of significant battles and create new efficient strategies.
• Foundation of Army Leadership: Military Culture and Its Impact on Mental Health The pillars of military leadership are character, presence, and intellect. The character may be described as an individual’s distinct mental and moral attributes.
• Leadership Deficiency in the Military Destructive leadership strategy contributes to the concept of adequate leadership deficiency in the US military today and presents a major problem for soldiers and officers.
• Combat to Corporate: Migrating from Military Leadership to Business Military leadership and civilian business leadership rely on overlapping sets of leadership skills and personal traits.
• Belize’s Military Capability Belize’s military potential is limited to border protection with minimal assault capabilities. The major factor disrupting stable affairs is its dispute with Guatemala.
• Religious Studies and Theology: Paganism in the Military Paganism has spread far and wide in society. From academia to the military, the practice of paganism is being accepted and accommodated just like other religions.
• Military Drones: Innovation Project Unmanned aerial vehicles have revolutionized modern-day wars and the approach that is used to collect data, especially in locations deemed unsafe for military personnel.
• Positive Psychology for Military Leadership Leadership in the military is a complex task given the adverse working environment of officers especially during and after deployment.
• Transitioning from Military to Civilian Life People who have participated in a war, killed someone, or became injured due to others’ actions take much time to recover.
• The King Fahd Military Medical Complex: Patient Improvement This report discusses decrease length of stay and improve patient workflow at the King Fahd Military Medical Complex’s accident and emergency department.
• Customs and Courtesies in the Military: Survey Feedback Use of survey feedback as a means of improving safety culture and consciousness in the U. S. army has increased staff awareness of safety and risks while on and off-duty.
• Maintaining and Not Losing Equipment in the Military Understanding the importance of maintaining and not losing equipment in the military depends on three aspects – availability, quality, and personal needs.
• The Collective Unity Against Military Might The colonists managed to be victorious against a greater and stronger army of the British empire due to superior leadership, consolidation of alliances, and military strategies.
• Domestic Violence in the Military Domestic violence is a pervasive problem connected with PTSD, subsequent substance abuse, and occupational hazards that increase stress and result in marital conflict.
• Reason for the Roman Military’s Success This essay will argue that the main reason for the Roman military success was not only strong discipline and hard training but also a careful selection of recruit.
• Shooting at Military Recruiting Center: Identification, Description, Historical Background The attack occurred at Chattanooga, when a 24-year old Kuwaiti gunman stormed a military recruiting station and opened fire to trainees.
• Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice For applying the provisions of Article 86 there must be proof that the accused had actual knowledge of the time and place where he was required to be present.
• Military Forces in the Twenty-First Century This essay aims to show that in the twenty-first century the military forces will be directed more toward peace and security maintenance issues around the world.
• Military Organization: Leveraging Human Capital The discussion outlines various approaches that can be used in the targeted military organization to leverage human capital.
• When Is the Use of Military Force Justified? Current justification of the use of military force is quite reasonable, but it is still far too loose for being used only in the instances that cannot be addressed with the help of diplomacy.
• The Canadian Armed Forces: Impact of Military History Understanding Canada’s military history and the divergent local and international relations contributes to appreciating the core values of service in the Canadian Armed Forces.
• An Effective Leadership Style in Military Units This paper proposes a research study intended to gather more information regarding different types of leadership in military units.
• Veterans’ Transition From the Military to Civilian Life This paper examines the main problems encountered by veterans during the transition from the military to civilian life, for example, social stigmas and drug abuse.
• Closing the Gap Between Military Service and Civilian Career A gulf between Military Service and Civilian careers prevents veterans from successfully integrating into society after military service.
• Army Leadership and Military Profession Leadership is a term that refers to the process of motivating and directing people to achieve common goals. It can also be defined as the ability of an influence.
• Ancient History: The Key Military Periods In the ancient history, the key military periods are connected with the Trojan, Messenian, and Greco-Persian wars, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and the Hellenistic wars.
• Military Spending and the US Foreign Policy Military spending has become an issue of debate in recent years as a section of the United States population believes it may be affecting other sectors.
• Analysis of The British Military Aircraft Incident The incident occurred on July 22, 1966, at RAF Lyneham Air Force Base (Chippenham, UK) while maintaining a Lightning F53 supersonic interceptor aircraft.
• The Issue of Military Aviation Crashes Military aviation is one of the most complex elements of the military system. The paper discusses the issue of aviation crashes and recommendations for its addressing.
• Military Violence: Negative Impact on Society This paper focuses on military violence and its negative impact on society. Gun violence is a critically relevant topic that affects all segments of the population of the US.
• Military Aviation Safety and Human Factor The current report examines the connection between military aviation safety and the human factor, exploring the most pressing concerns within the topic.
• The Rise of Sexual Assault in the US Military The paper explores why the numbers of Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault cases continue to rise throughout the Army, despite all the training that takes place.
• Tahtib: Egyptian Sports and Military Game Both competing audiences benefit from the beauty and constancy of tahtib skills and rhythm, which have evolved over their long history.
• The Issue of Rising Levels of Opioid Addiction in the Military The proposed research will seek to establish the correlation between veterans’ injuries and opioid addictions among this population.
• The Military Profession’s Culture and Ethics This paper analyzes the military profession, its culture, and ethics which are vital factors for the military human resource specialist.
• Expenditures for Pensions, Social Welfare, and Military It is no mystery that the U.S. military budget is the biggest in the world with a significant margin, even despite the absence of imminent global threats.
• US Military Interventions Between 1918 and 1962 This paper provides a review of U.S. military interventions between 1918 and 1962, discussing the effectiveness and pros and cons of military operations.
• Human Resources in Military Sphere The army is responsible for the country’s security and includes many representatives in various positions – from generals to ordinary soldiers.
• Alexander the Great: The World’s Greatest Military General Alexander III of Macedon, known worldwide as Alexander the Great, is frequently regarded as one of the world’s greatest military generals of all time.
• When the U.S. Military Strikes While the state of war between the parties can be questioned on the international level, the US authorities are clear in their reasoning and intentions.
• World War II: Maskirovka Military Deception and Denials Operations This paper investigates the impact of maskirovka military deception and denials operations, a component of information warfare. The case study is set during World War II.
• Warfare Theories, Military Technology and Pacifism Warfare generally denotes the intentional and consistent military action among independent nations or states until the defeat of the opponent.
• Hurricane Katrina: Military and Civilian Response One of the three most dramatic catastrophes of the millennium, hurricane Katrina highlighted weak points of government and military forces.
• Omar Nelson Bradley in American Military History Omar Nelson Bradley is one of the most influential military people in the history of the United States. He was assigned by the President to several military positions.
• Media Coverage of Transgender Policy in Military This paper aims to provide an annotated bibliography for the ten articles related to the topic of media coverage of transgender policy in the military.
• History of the US Military The US military is presently seen not just as the most impressive and exceptional outfitted power on the planet yet one with a multifaceted administrative role also.
• “Yankee Blitzkrieg”: Historical Assessment of the Former Military “Yankee Blitzkrieg” is a book describing the largest mounted expedition led by James H. Wilson; it is characterized by consistency, clarity, and innovative narrative tactics.
• Secondary Traumatization of PTSD Among Children in Military Families Military officers and veterans work in highly stressful environments, hence, experiencing different levels of PTSD depending on the armed nature of a given conflict.
• Military Sexual Trauma: PTSD in Female Veterans The following paper suggests a literature review on the subject of post traumatic stress disorder associated with military sexual trauma in female veterans.
• Transition from Military Service to Entrepreneurship Identifying the positive and negative traits acquired during military service is an essential aspect of studying the success of veterans in entrepreneurship.
• Analysis of LGBT Integration in Military The study examines integrating LGBT people into the army and identified the main points that influenced the formation of acceptance of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals.
• Kolcaba’s Comfort Theory in Regard to Military Veterans With PTSD To sum up, if the experiment proves reliable and valid, the application for those who have PTSD may be improved or facilitated for everyday use.
• Cognitive Behavior Theory for Military Veteran Cognitive behavior theory is based on the idea that an individual is able to alter their behavior by interfering with their thought patterns.
• Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military: Addressing the Issue This essay will address sexual assaults in the U.S. military, examine possible causes, and acknowledge possible solutions.
• Military Leadership: Combat Bunker to the Corporate Boardroom The research on the topic of leadership management is substantial, filled with primary and secondary sources covering the various aspects of theoretical and practical discussions.
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Military Militants experience a significant number of traumatic events that subject them to PTSD. The culture of the military plays a significant role in promoting veteran mental wellness.
• Military Leadership Traits Migration into Business Recently, society has been observing military people’s tendency to transition into entrepreneurs, and this phenomenon becomes increasingly popular annually.
• Combat to Corporate: Military Traits in Business The investigation aims to determine what military traits are most likely to be incorporated into a business sphere and how they can benefit it.
• The Counterterrorism Tasks by the Military and Government The US government works with other governments to fight against terrorism. Efforts are made to discourage and anticipate attacks by apprehending the individuals.
• Power, Influence, and Communications Within a Military Setting There are five primary types of power that can be exercised to gain influence over others, they include coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, and referent power.
• Political Science: Human Security & Revolution-in-Military-Affairs The major susceptibilities and challenges include protracted violence and political conflicts, diseases, epidemics, natural calamities, economic crises and ethnic violence.
• The Foundation of Army Leadership and Military Training One of the aims of military leadership is to prepare soldiers for the defensive mission. Army leaders provide direction and set goals for the subordinates to achieve successfully.
• The History of Women in the United States Military The increase of the part of women in the military of USA is not steady but concurs with the periods of wars when they could prove the irreplaceability of their skills.
• The President’s and Congress’s Powers Regarding Using Military Forces The powers of the US President consist of the powers admitted by Article II of the US Constitution, powers accepted by Acts of Congress, and, besides, there is soft power.
• Mental Health Stigma for Military Man and Civilians This source will contribute to my research regarding comparing the mental disorder stigma among civilians and military veterans.
• Correlation Between Military Leaders and Cultural Diversity The article discusses the need for modern military personnel to be trained as leaders, free from cultural bias in their views and actions.
• Diversity in the Military The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of human diversity and its usefulness in a military context.
• Military Conflict and Involvement Consequences Humanity entered the era of humanism, characterized by the great attention to human rights, the man in the whole, and by the constant wars and military conflicts.
• Mental Health Conditions Among Military Veterans The research will analyze whether the incidence of symptoms and their link to individuals’ experiences relate to their military service
• American-Japanese Military and Race Conflicts in the Book “War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War” The issues of prejudice, tunnel vision and inability to see the situation from all sides are described in the present book.
• Involuntary Discharged Military Personnel Transitioning into Civilian Workforce Most of the findings of many researchers have focused on veterans and former employees who exited the profession voluntarily.
• The Children Use in Military Activities The issue of children serving as soldiers in military conflicts is sensitive indeed. The increasing use of children in military conflicts has grown and threatens the social fibre.
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Gays in the Us Military Homosexuals in the military have always had to hide their sexual orientation to prevent discrimination, incrimination, or even discharge from service.
• Military Leadership Characteristics in U.S.A The army of the United States has professional military ethics, which states that a military leader should be loyal to his or her nation and unit.
• Military Service: The Obligation of the American Citizens Joining the military is associated with various benefits. It is a good opportunity for one to realize their patriotism in addition to educational standards.
• Critical Decisions Making: Get Out of the Military This analysis will help me get the best out of the decision by avoiding the various biases to come to a better decision.
• EU Requirement of Common Foreign and Military Policy This paper discusses the need for a common foreign and military policy for the EU. The European Union is at the forefront in asserting itself to play a role in world affairs.
• Gays in the Military: Current Situation and Problems While much effort is being put in to allow the marriage of persons of the same sex, this has not affected the military, since homosexuals are barred from taking up in the military.
• Homeland Security: The Role of the US Military Increased military involvement in homeland security better prepares the country for multiple disasters as it expands its capacity.
• American Public Attitudes to Overseas Military Deployment This essay will discuss the role of the increased media coverage in the shaping of the attitudes of Americans towards military activity abroad.
• Hiring Prior Military for a Job An increasing number of the citizen-soldier population gives the Government few reasons to provide such people with guarantees of their employment.
• US Military Overseas Commitments North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance which was formed by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in the year 1949.
• To Have or Not to Have a Military Draft To have or not to have a military draft is a debate that has sparked many views nationwide. America has not had a military draft since 1973.
• Immediate Troop-Withdrawal Plan: Withdrawal of the American Military Forces From Iraq There was increased debate on whether to withdraw the American Military forces from Iraq since they were the once who were behind the war that was in Iraq that lasted for a period of five years.
• Generation Kill: Stanley McChrystal’s Military Approach McChrystal reorganized the approach American Special Forces took towards operations. Some people praise his achievements in creating a superior precision killing machine.
• Military Transition to Civilian Life As the target audience for this study, first-generation Latinos are involved, who have completed military service and moved on to civilian life.
• Transforming Military Logistic Systems in the Department of Defense Technology has indeed helped resolve some of the world’s greatest challenges. For this reason, it is viable to argue that tech can be used to solve challenges faced within supply chain management.
• Social Adaptation of Former Military Members Social adaptation to civilian life of former members of the military is a unique and significant area of inquiry.
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military Veterans Both in the military and civilian life, people encounter traumatic occurrences that challenge their perception of the world or themselves.
• Technology Influences That Affect the Military This work is aimed at identifying significant factors that influence the activities of the military and modern national security standards.
• When Military Force Is Justified The use of military force should be the last option after all other dispute resolution mechanisms have failed. This paper discusses cases where military force is justified.
• Unity of Command in Military Operation Anaconda The major purpose of the unity of command is to arrange the effective operation of various forces under the authority of a single commander.
• Alexander the Great as a Military General Whereas some sources claim that Alexander’s military tactics borrowed heavily from those of his father, Philip II of Macedonia, there are critics who believe that they did not.
• United States Military Veteran Suicides and Causes Researchers have not agreed on the exact causes of suicide cases in the US military. Initially, it was assumed that deployment was a risk factor for this behavior.
• Military Commissions and Terrorism Prevention The measures aimed at reducing the spread of international terrorism should align with international laws. The legal authority of military commissions should be discussed.
• The Level of Military Service Organization in the US The paper analysis the idea to optimize the core activities of military HR professionals to the level that is demonstrated by the representatives from the Department of Defense (DOD).
• Military Human Resource Professionals: Activities Optimization Civilian and military managers are the members of the team that is responsible for appropriate and effective services offered to people who are engaged in military life.
• American Military Management Systems Assessment Adequate assessment of sources of potential threats can increase national safety with regard to numerous messages that are used by terrorists.
• Asian International Politics and Military Conflicts The Cold War mentality of Japan was that of strengthening ties with Western powers to contain other Asian emerging powers.
• Management Styles in the Military Field Organizations want to outperform their competitors and choose management styles that fit their organizational and market realities.
• Strategic Thinking and Military Lessons Strategic thinking enables a person to reach levels that one could have otherwise not reached if they were to work in a conventional manner.
• Military Veterans’ Mental Health Needs The topic of the study concerns the mental health needs of veterans who suffer different types of disorders as the result of their military service.
• The Massive Military’s Layoff of the Obama Administration This paper discusses the massive layoff within the military during the Obama administration using the four-frame model.
• WWI and Interwar Military Innovations WWI triggered the development of an array of interwar military innovations. Today specialization is common in contemporary military forces.
• American Military Approaches in the East This work discusses questions related to the Korean War, US military approaches in Vietnam, Vietnamization, the Arab-Israeli war, and the American way of war.
• Military Treatment, Success, and Diverse Groups This paper highlights the correlation between the integration of the micro and macro-sociological theories and the successful treatment of diverse groups.
• Military Personnel and Psychological Risks Researchers have discovered that the sense of loneliness is one of the risk factors that potentially cause various mental disorders among active-duty soldiers.
• Military on the US Southern Border Even serving at the southern border, the military will not be able to serve all issues associated with the case of Mexico.
• Discipline Implementation in Military Environment The state of the army leaves much to be desired regarding the discipline levels and the allocation of the army resources. Immediate actions should be taken to handle the problem.
• Bereaved Military Children: Group Intervention Bereavement is one of the most stressful events, and it is closely linked to anxiety, depression, fear, aggressiveness, and regression.
• The Great Depression and Military Spending The Great Depression had a devastating impact on the US economy. But military spending could be consider the main tool of it ended and promoting the growth of the industrial sector.
• Military Spending by the Government of the United States The US federal government allocates excess resources to its military, and some money could assist in other areas of the economy.
• Military Policy that Should Be Changed The military is a secret organization that does not disclose its activities to the public, mainly because of the strict rules and regulations. Some of how things are conducted ought to be changed.
• Stealth Aircraft Support in the United States Military This paper will argue that maintaining an edge on military technology and the air force is crucial for the US by giving reasons why it is important for the US military to have stealth aircrafts.
• Automated vs. Military Pitot Static Tester The report proposes that the Military Pitot Static Model is much better than the 6300 model. However, diligence should be observed depending on the aircraft that is being tested.
• Military Medical Assets Usage In case of an emergency, not only the ability of the military services to locate and utilize the required sources, but also the capability of the military people to cooperate.
• Political Issues: The United States Military The military has one of the most advanced technologies in the world, as soldiers have to face the harshest conditions in their service and general life.
• What Is a Military System of Government?
• What Is the Name of a Military Force Made up of Civilians?
• Does the US Military Have the Death Penalty?
• Who Was the First Military Governor of Florida?
• What Military Technologies Did the Industrial Revolution Provide to Europeans?
• Is Military Government Undemocratic?
• Did President Truman Improperly Interfere in Military Operations in Korea?
• Is Egypt a Military Dictatorship?
• Does the Military Generate Any Revenue for a Country?
• What Military Need Led to the Production of Liberty Ships?
• Why Do Southern States Have So Many Military Bases?
• What Historical Discipline Does Military Science Cover?
• What Is a Pincer Movement in Military Strategy?
• How Were African Nations Affected by Military Rule and Dictatorship?
• How Is the US Military Restricted by the Third Amendment?
• Why Do We Need to Study Military History?
• How Is the Social Problem of the Military’s Transition to Civilian Life Solved?
• Were Soldiers Called Military in the Middle Ages?
• Did the Byzantine Empire Have a Strong Military?
• Who Created the Military Phonetic Alphabet?
• Are Military Police Sworn Officers?
• What Military Technology Was Used in the Battle of Ypres?
• Is Cognitive Dissonance Used in the Military?
• Are Members of the Military Government Employees?
• What Is the Purpose of the Military Annual Percentage Rate?
• What Is the Significance of Military Tribunals in Today’s Environment?
• What Is the Largest Military Cemetery in the United States?
• How Many Five Star Generals Are in Us Military History?
• How Did Bushido Contribute to Japanese Military Aggression?

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These essay examples and topics on Military were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 8, 2024 .

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66 Military Speech Topics [Persuasive, Informative]

Jim Peterson has over 20 years experience on speech writing. He wrote over 300 free speech topic ideas and how-to guides for any kind of public speaking and speech writing assignments at My Speech Class.

I try to cover for you as much persuasive and informative themes as possible related to defense and armed forces, militias, the marine corps and coast guard. This is one of my special speech topic idea pages.

Look on the left for other general and focused examples for an educational spoken essay presentation at school. Twenty interesting and current military speech topics for a good informative on objects, subjects, events, structures and entities can be about:

• Air missile defense strategies in East Europe.
• Small arms and light weapons sales in malls.
• Structure of our armed forces; at sea, on land, in the air.
• Famous battles and wars that form our nation.
• Chain of command in special operations.
• Bases, camps and forts as the defense line.
• Intelligence services: do they cooperate?
• Nuclear weapons stock by country or region.
• Bunker busters; how do they work.
• Patriot missile defense as an example of military engineering.
• Medal of Honor categories and heroes.
• Purple Heart conditions and recipients.
• West Point Academy education curriculum.
• Naval Coast Guard operations on the seas.
• Chief of Staff position and power.
• Megastructures engineered for the army.
• Army marching bands and orchestras and their history.
• Ways to salute in different countries.
• Pentagon building architeture of concentric pentagonal rings and radial corridors.
• Life in a submarine for ten months.
• African Union should increase the number of troops deployed in the Sudanese Darfur province.
• Military actions against regimes with hostile policies is inevitable.
• The effect of war on the economy.
• Closer diplomatic ties with North Korea will mean more control.
• Decommissioning is the only way to negotiate with war lords in Sudan.
• Diplomatic immunity issues in dictatorial systems are based on military power.
• Efforts to bring Nazi war crime suspects to trial will never be successful.
• Every citizen should commit to 2,000 hours of voluntary national service in their lifetime.
• Have more women in military staff functions.
• Immigration control is important to preserve security and culture.
• It’s not cowardly to refuse to fight in a war.
• Kids are most likely to become child soldiers if they are poor.
• Military service should be based on conduct, not sexual orientation.
• Mothers must be persuaded not to fight in militairy combat front lines.
• Negotiating with terrorists is justifiable.
• Recruiting marines is a though duty
• Restrictions on weapons trade ought to be more severe.
• Sometimes force and violence are needed to make peace.
• Support initiatives to help child soldiers.
• The military corps – professionals and / or voluntareers.
• The next great world war will be in western Europe again.
• The US-Mexican border fence to tighten homeland security does not work.
• The use of torture is never appropriate.
• There should be a Code of Conduct in the arms trade.
• Unilateral military action is wrong without the consent of the United Nations.
• We must never stop honouring war veterans.

Here are easy to research ideas for writing a speech on women in the military speech topics:

• Women in front-combat lines: ban or not?
• Role of women in World War II; female power behind the screens.
• Famous female intelligence spies, there are more than you think.
• Sexual harassment policies in the military.
• Women on high positions in the army.
• Seagoing positions and responsibilities on combat ships.
• History of the position of women in military service.
• All jobs in the air force should be opened for females.
• Effects on morale, training, and unit workload.
• Protection in ground combat.

These are examples of military speech topics based on interesting persuasive government policy writing topics. Describe pros/cons or take a side in the public debate about these speech ideas on controversial:

• Are smart bombs really that smart?
• Biological and chemical weapons.
• Nuclear proliferation treaties do they bring a peaceful balance?
• Arms trade codes of conduct by the large co-operating governments.
• Regional conflicts. Cover not all of course, but I think you could pick out one or two and compare the similarities and upper-regional consequences in the long term.
• Space security – a myth or already taken in position in secret agreements?
• Use of dirty bombs and the international protests against it.
• GI Bill on caring for veterans.
• Veteran affairs.
• Military budget cuts and spending balance.

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100 Army Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Essay writing is an integral part of academic life, and one topic that frequently arises is the military. The army, in particular, offers a wide range of essay topics that can be explored from various angles. Whether you are a history enthusiast, a political science major, or simply fascinated by military strategies and tactics, here are 100 army essay topic ideas and examples to inspire you.

Historical Topics:

• The significance of the Battle of Thermopylae in military history.
• The role of women in the Revolutionary War.
• The impact of military technology on World War I.
• The reasons behind the fall of the Roman Empire.
• Analyzing the strategies employed by Napoleon Bonaparte.
• The importance of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War.
• The impact of the Mongol Empire on military tactics.
• The significance of D-Day in World War II.
• The role of the military in the American Revolution.
• The influence of the Roman army on modern military organizations.

Political Science and International Relations:

• The role of the military in nation-building.
• The impact of military coups on democratic governments.
• The relationship between military spending and economic growth.
• The role of the United Nations in peacekeeping operations.
• The influence of the military-industrial complex on foreign policy.
• The impact of nuclear weapons on global security.
• The role of the military in counterterrorism operations.
• The effectiveness of military interventions in resolving conflicts.
• The challenges of integrating women into combat roles.
• The impact of cybersecurity threats on military operations.

Ethics and Morality:

• The ethical implications of autonomous weapons systems.
• The role of morality in the decision to go to war.
• The ethics of using child soldiers in armed conflicts.
• The responsibility of soldiers in following orders.
• The ethics of military recruitment tactics.
• The impact of PTSD on soldiers' mental health and ethical decision-making.
• The role of military tribunals in ensuring justice and accountability.
• The ethics of using drones in military operations.
• The moral dilemmas faced by soldiers in the fog of war.
• The ethics of military intervention in humanitarian crises.

Leadership and Strategy:

• The qualities of an effective military leader.
• The importance of strategic planning in military operations.
• The role of intelligence in military decision-making.
• The impact of technological advancements on military strategies.
• The effectiveness of asymmetric warfare tactics.
• The relationship between military strategy and diplomacy.
• The role of military alliances in global security.
• The influence of military culture on leadership styles.
• The impact of military training on leadership development.
• The lessons learned from historical military failures.

Social and Psychological Aspects:

• The social impact of military service on veterans and their families.
• The psychology of heroism in the military.
• The influence of military service on personal identity.
• The impact of military deployments on military families.
• The role of military rituals and traditions in building camaraderie.
• The relationship between military service and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• The challenges faced by military personnel during the transition to civilian life.
• The impact of military service on mental health and well-being.
• The role of military education in promoting resilience and adaptability.
• The influence of military subcultures on individual behavior.

Technology and Innovation:

• The impact of drones on military operations and ethics.
• The role of artificial intelligence in future military strategies.
• The potential of bioengineering in enhancing military capabilities.
• The influence of cyber warfare on international security.
• The use of virtual reality in military training.
• The impact of advanced weaponry on the future of warfare.
• The role of space technology in military operations.
• The ethics of using unmanned vehicles in military missions.
• The influence of communication technologies on military strategies.
• The potential of nanotechnology in military applications.

Military History and Cultural Impact:

• The portrayal of war and the military in literature and film.
• The impact of war on art and creativity throughout history.
• The cultural significance of military memorials and monuments.
• The portrayal of soldiers and veterans in popular culture.
• The role of military history in shaping national identity.
• The impact of war on the environment and natural resources.
• The representation of women in military history.
• The role of military museums in preserving historical artifacts.
• The influence of military fashion and uniforms on popular culture.
• The portrayal of war in video games and its impact on society.

Humanitarian Efforts and Peacekeeping:

• The role of the military in disaster response and relief efforts.
• The impact of military peacekeeping missions on conflict resolution.
• The challenges faced by military personnel in humanitarian operations.
• The relationship between military intervention and human rights.
• The effectiveness of military forces in promoting stability and peace.
• The role of military engineers in infrastructure development.
• The challenges of providing medical care in military operations.
• The impact of military assistance on developing countries.
• The importance of cultural sensitivity in military humanitarian efforts.
• The relationship between military operations and refugee crises.

Military Intelligence and Espionage:

• The history and significance of code-breaking in military intelligence.
• The impact of intelligence failures on military operations.
• The role of spies and espionage in shaping military strategies.
• The influence of technological advancements on military intelligence gathering.
• The challenges of balancing national security with individual privacy.
• The ethics of using informants and double agents in military intelligence.
• The role of cyber intelligence in modern warfare.
• The impact of disinformation campaigns on military decision-making.
• The relationship between military intelligence and diplomatic negotiations.
• The vulnerabilities and challenges of military cybersecurity.

Military Training and Education:

• The importance of physical fitness in military training.
• The role of military academies in shaping future leaders.
• The impact of military training on discipline and character development.
• The challenges faced by military personnel in adapting to new technologies.
• The effectiveness of simulation training in preparing soldiers for combat.
• The role of military training in fostering teamwork and camaraderie.
• The influence of cultural diversity in military training programs.
• The challenges of integrating new recruits into existing military units.
• The importance of lifelong learning in military careers.
• The impact of military education on civilian career prospects.

These essay topic ideas and examples provide a starting point for exploring the multifaceted aspects of the military. Whether you choose to focus on historical events, ethical dilemmas, leadership strategies, or technological advancements, remember to conduct thorough research, critically analyze the information, and present a well-structured argument in your essay. Good luck!

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122 Army Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best army topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on army, 💡 most interesting army topics to write about, ⭐ simple & easy army essay titles.

• Foundation of Army Leadership Essay The Army leaders therefore, need to be swift, adaptive, and multi-skilled both in the country and across the world. This ensures obedience of the Army to the authority of the President and his authority from […]
• Foundations of Army Leadership BLC This paper examines the foundation of Army leadership, focusing on its levels and leaders’ characteristic features. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Why Women Should Not Be Allowed to Serve in the Army In the present day, with the growing popularity of the ideas of feminism and gender equality, the question related to whether women should be allowed to serve in the army and take part in military […]
• Importance of Army Cybersecurity This includes bringing awareness to the cybersecurity issue, involving more people to combat the problem of cyberattacks, and organizing the information based on specialty and tasks that must be completed.
• An Army Leader’s Must-Have Attributes In the context of the army, the perspectives and approaches to leadership have several distinct characteristics. Presence is the concept that refers to the availability of a leader.
• Researching of Army Sustainment Sustainment is a critical part of the war and has four components of the warfighting purpose: logistics, financial management, personnel services, and healthcare support.
• The Army’s Regulation 600-13 for Female Soldiers God created man and woman in the Garden of Eden and charged them both with the duty of multiplying and subduing the earth and also having dominion over everything that moves on it.
• “Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-45” by C. Merridale The book Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army by Catherine Merridale is an attempt to investigate the destinies of ordinary people, who served in the Red Army, in the course of the […]
• The United States Army’s Change Management Beginning with the introduction of the theme, the paper proceeds with the specification of the challenges that need to be addressed by defense leaders, including such issues as external and internal contexts.
• The Army’s Financial Needs I believe this is the most appropriate funding option for the second project as it does not require much capital compared to the first project. Besides, it would be inappropriate for the organization to consider […]
• Challenges of Managing the Army and War The primary subcomponent is to ensure setting a camp in the backline of the trenches or frontline of the anticipated or planned battleground.
• The Army Profession: Key Aspects Encouraging a discussion about the army is crucial in understanding its basic foundations and the roles and responsibilities of employees and leaders in balancing between the culture, environment, and expectations from the citizens.
• The Dumbledore Army: Social Media Power The organization was based entirely on the power of the social media, particularly, Facebook and MySpace. As for the social status, mostly the representatives of the American middle class can be found in the HPA.
• Communication Challenges in the US Army In combat conditions, the lack of established communication will not allow the soldiers to show leadership, the commander to effectively convey the order, and the entire army to competently execute it.
• V-2 Rocket and Its Impact on World War II and Today US Army The V-2 rocket was influential not only in the Second World War but also shaped the concept of the future of the US Army and is the prototype for many modern weapons.
• Struggles of African-American Soldiers: Inequality in Army Service Soldiers lost their motivation to serve in the Wars because the government of the United States disregarded their rights and claimed that the attitude to their families was peaceful.
• The Importance of PTSD for Master Leaders Course in the Army The multiplicity of this manifestation and presentation of PTSD creates a research question focusing on the need for research into the main types of disorder and the support.
• Improving Human Resources Support for Army Civilians Unlike other organizations using traditional recruitment, the ones using the platform are more likely to get the best talents to fill the position. Human resource management must make essential changes in the recruitment and management […]
• John Paul Jones, the Patriarch of the U.S. Army 3 The vessel’s owners made Jones the master of the ship and the crew, giving the commander ten percent of the cargo in reward for the work well done.
• The United States Army Subordinate Leader Development One of the issues necessary to be covered through subordinate leader development programs is the need to adapt to a future environment through flexibility and critical thinking.
• This Is My Squad for Sergeant Major of the Army In the military, it is often a matter of life or death, and cohesion is an integral element of a squad.
• The Foundation of Army Leadership and Its Factors It is important to note that leadership is among the most critical aspect of the military since it is directly tied to the organization and structure of an army.
• Culinary Modernization in the Army The main purpose of the modernization of food acquisition in the Army is to build food supply networks that provide safe, nutritious, and high-quality ingredients.
• The Army of the United States’ Modernization Strategy In June 2021, the Secretary of the Army and the Army’s Chief of Staff announced before Congress that the Army would revise its priorities to ensure people are put first. The Army needs to continue […]
• Violence and Harassment in the Army The case shows that the imperfection of the military and the supervision of violence is reflected in the denial of problems, the length of investigations, and the lack of decisive action.
• Discussion: Army Design Methodology Secondly, they develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the problem and the current operational environment in which it occurs. Army Design Methodology generally consists of grasping the complexity and collaborating with others to […]
• Army Design Methodology: Framing the Problem Since the Houthis have a strategic advantage in the target setting, there is an obvious problem with the level of awareness regarding the spatial orientation and the management of the decision-making process in relation to […]
• Duties and Responsibilities of the US Army Under Title Code 10 The CBA process involves three phases, which asses and analyze the effectiveness and capability of the Joint concept to execute the framework’s mission.
• Erwin Rommel: Military General in the Nazi Army Nevertheless, in early 1941, Hitler promoted Rommel to the commander of the German troops in North Africa, and shortly after, the whole world recognized the military genius of Rommel.
• The Greatest Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Threats to the US Army The main strategy of the Department of Defense against CBRN threats is aimed at managing the threat and reducing the vulnerability of the system.
• Army Design Methodology to Problem Solving Army Design Methodology is a process used by Army Leaders that allows them to apply critical thinking to analyze problems in the operational environment to find appropriate solutions to them.
• Army Soldier’s Fitness in the US and Saudi Arabia In the problem section, the inability of the Army to educate its subjects, along with some of the general trends regarding physical fitness in the US, Saudi Arabia, and the world’s militaries.
• The Army Design Methodology and Techniques In order to understand the terminology used in the doctrine, it is crucial for readers to know how the operational process works.
• The Army Design Methodology: Goals and Approaches In this way, the Army design methodology allows for critical thinking as well as out-of-the-box creative approaches to solving complex military problems and planning strategies.
• Why I Want to Be an Army Chaplain I had the opportunity to experience and appreciate the importance of an army chaplain after the untimely death of my neighbor who served in the US armed forces.
• Religious Support in the Pluralistic Army Environment Active interaction with the leaders of military units who have influence over soldiers and maintaining contacts with chaplains from other units are effective strategies to provide comprehensive spiritual support.
• Impact of World War I on the American Army Some of the major strategies include the use of airplanes in the field of battle, employing armored vehicles, and electronic communication.
• Civilian and Army’s Supply Chain Management Moreover, TOC is a continuous process that can be used to determine the constraints that do not allow the supply chain to operate to the best of its capacity.
• Army and Air Force Exchange Employee Retention Program: Analysis of Strategies The values of AAFES will have to be altered to promote the significance of all stakeholders involved, including the employees.
• The Army Professional Culture Thanks to this, the activities of the army become systematic and standardized. The role of HR sergeants in the army is undeniable and important to every military community.
• Army’s and Marine Corps’ Pursuit of Long-Range Precision Strike Capabilities The purchasing power is supposed to allow the services to make informed decisions ad purchase the right arsenal and weapons that resonate with the demands of the intended conflict.
• Leaders of the Army in Achieving the Mission Leaders in the Army should take the mission seriously and understand its high priority. Leaders and their followers should understand that some of them might suffer to achieve the Army mission.
• Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County vs. Army Corps of Engineers Case Brief The Corps changed their argument to state that the water in the ponds qualified as ‘waters of the United States of America’ and not as initially determined.
• Nurse Burnout Across Army Hospital Practice Environments The authors of this article correctly note that American Army nurses have been deployed to some of the most dangerous parts of the world in the recent past due to the heightened need for global […]
• The Army Health System and Homeland Defence In addition, a sick military officer can be a serious burden to the success of an operation and thus the Army Health System must ensure all military officers are healthy.
• Reserve Army of Labor The labor force is seen as a variable cost of production that the bourgeoisie can control/manipulate in a way that exploits the proletariat.
• Army, Profession of Arms The profession involves the use of lethal weapons and an undefined force for the maintenance and defense of the laws and the rights of the American people.
• Executive Summary on United States Army Intelligence and Security Command The USA established a Military airborne intelligence gathering system at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Consequently, INSCOM was created in early 1977 out of the need to improve and consolidate the USA military intelligence […]
• The American Army: Political Science John wanted to become a warrior, belong to the company of the best soldiers in the world, to see the world, and to have financial stability.
• Female Military in the Continental Army John Rees claims that the percentage of women in the Continental Army was around 3%, but the actual number is hard to find out since some women were disguised as men, and a lot of […]
• Anarchism. Zapatista Army of National Liberation Anarchism is a kind of philosophy in the political world that believes that the state of government is not necessary, not desired and it is in most cases harmful and oppressive and the society should […]
• The Downfall of the Army This is because, in the case of external aggression, it is the army that will be directly responsible for the defense of the people.
• Albert J. Myer, First Army Chief of Signal Corps A panel was selected to scrutinize the values and tactics of the signaling mode of use in the ground and the course to be followed in initiating to the army.
• What Should the Army Do With the Future Combat System Program? In the case of the FCS the Army could take the necessary budget requests from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as reported in the GAO report and extend the timeframe in order to […]
• Army Future Combat System: What Are the Prospects? The FCS has been left loose by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the army continues to deviate from the policy of weapon systems acquisitions.
• Business Case Analysis of US Army The five steps in the decision-making process are a statement of the problem, alternatives identification, evaluation of alternatives, decision stage, and implementation of the decision.
• The Salvation Army’s Mission and Functions The Salvation Army is a non-profit organisation that has formed as a global Christian Church to provide a number of welfare tasks to the deprived and affected human being at the time of different natural […]
• Officer in the United States Army John J Pershing Furthermore, his successes in the previous battles speaks volumes of his leadership abilities and justifies the promotion to the highest rank ever held by a united states officer in his lifetime; the rank of General […]
• Variables Differentiation of the United States Army In respect to the US Army, the dependant variables include the desire to quit the service and the service satisfaction of the soldiers.
• Terrorism. Irish Republican Army Protestants in Northern Ireland believe the decommissioning was a fiasco and the IRA has the ambition, resources, and capability to carry on its campaign.
• Noncommissioned Officers in the American Army 1775 – 1865 The major aim of every of the above mentioned weapon was to ensure the fulfillment of their duties by the ordinary soldiers and officers subordinated to the NCOs.
• Performance Management System in the United States Army The main purpose of this report is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the performance management system in the United States Army and make recommendations, which may improve the system.
• Work-Life Policies in the U.S. Army Work-life practices constitute the foundation of organizational commitment and service dedication, so the effectiveness of the currently applied work-life policies in the US Army is of great importance, and this is the topic of the […]
• Human Resource Outsourcing in the US Army The U. The U.
• The Battle of Fallen Timbers: The U. S. Army Against Native American Indians The lands over the Appalachian Mountains, extending to the Mississippi River was ceded to the United States by Great Britain as part of the treaty which saw the end of the American Revolution.
• Digital Army: Technology in Fighting and Training That is why they participated in the process of the design and development of the training techniques and strategies of the future Digital Army with the view to support the digital and new technology capabilities […]
• The United States Army Analysis The United States Army is the best out of all the services. Army is the best among all the services is that it allows people to pick the job field they want.
• Army Security Trends and Future When exploring how the army security will be in the future, land forces and their configuration structure will help to ensure there is a clear environment in order to depict the future and predict the […]
• Terra-Cotta Army: Organizational Power of Qin Dynasty After the museum, it seemed to be one of the marvelous art museums of the world.”Life-size terracotta figures of warriors and horses arranged in battle formations are the star features at the museum.
• The Concept of Army Combat Fitness Test There is complex and dynamic nature of the modern military and combat activity of the army and navy, the use of the latest information technologies, weapons and military equipment, and the country’s security interests.
• Medical Marijuana in the Army: Addressing a Problematic Issue Denying the use of medicinal marijuana as one of the fastest and the most efficient ways of relieving pain in the military setting, one will inevitably infringe upon the rights of American troops.
• Issues With the Army Combat Fitness Test and Why They Should Be Fixed This paper will review the drawbacks of the ACFT, including inadequate requirements for women, injuries associated with the test, the increased complexity of the trial, and the necessity to complete the two-mile run.
• The Relevance of the Army Combat Fitness Test for the U.S. Army The new Army Combat Fitness Test will be implemented by October 2020 and is considered as a better concept to forecast a soldier’s readiness for the pressure one will encounter on the modern battlefield.
• Ethics and Diversity in the United States Army At the same time, from the Revolutionary War to the Global War on Terrorism, the US Army has passed a great way and undergone multiple changes and transformations to preserve its efficiency and the ability […]
• Sexual Harassment and Prevention in the US Army The hypothesis is that some interventions to be applied by military leaders can be developed to address these challenges at the team and squad levels and achieve the reduction of sexual harassment and assault reports […]
• The History of the United States Army I was also unable to cope with the speed and accuracy required in the organization. I was also unable to communicate with different officials in the organization.
• US Army’s Logistics Services on the Kava Island The paper discusses the forces present in framing a business problem in the area. The other problem present in Kava is the population.
• US Army’s Human Resources and Knowledge Management Assessment of the effectiveness of organizing functions of managing human resources of the US Army has accepted the Army Leadership Program long ago.
• Management Functions in the United States Army With full compliance to the Soldier’s Manual and Trainer’s Guide, issued by the Department of The Army, I have to manage organizational duties, supervisory roles, and individual skills improvement factions as part of my military […]
• US Army Air Corps’ Innovation During Interwar Period The influence of the theories of air warfare on the development of technology and innovation during the Interwar Period is evident as both Mitchell and Douhet had rather similar views on the role of air […]
• The Immortals Army of Persian Empire The caravan was in charge of food supplies, which was unusual for the army, and of alongside attendants and concubines responsible for the well-being of the Persian Immortals before and after battles.
• Contemporary Issues of the Army The emergence of modern leadership styles and theories is something that will continue to transform the way different soldiers are led.
• The Organizational Behavior Within the U.S. Army The understanding of organizational culture helps to understand the origin of a certain type of organizational behavior. Thus, organizational identity means that the individuals share a common vision of who they are in the frames […]
• Women’s Ethical Dilemma in the United States Army I had wanted to demonstrate to girls in schools across the country that it is possible for a woman to succeed in the American military. One of the greatest principles I have embraced in my […]
• The Irish Republican Army History The formation of nationhood and its evolution is associated with the attempts to protect its culture, mentality, and independence from the expansionistic ambitions of neighboring countries trying to grasp new territories and increase their power.
• Battle of Isandlwana and British Army’s Defeat One of the major reasons for the Zulu’s win was their numerical superiority as compared to the British. The ratio of Zulu to British soldiers was about 20 to 1.
• The United States Army as Bureaucratic Organization In this regard, the comprehensive investigation of the given structure is fundamental to the enhanced understanding of its peculiarities and applicability to the existing business environment.
• Army & Air Force Exchange Service Employee Retention A redesign of the current benefits package with a stronger emphasis on the individual needs of the staff members is the primary option of the entrepreneurship.
• The Red Tops Orchestra’s Leadership in the Army The position of the orchestra was shaped under the influence of several critical elements, which defined the leadership direction. Primarily, the efficiency of the Red Tops team is assigned to the personality of Walter Osborne.
• The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda’s Silent War There have been some indicators that the war was nearly over but still that seemed to be a dream for the people of Uganda since the rebel group was still tormenting the people in the […]
• US Army’s Competencies, Resources, Capabilities In the 21st century, the United States Army is considered the finest in the world in terms of capabilities and second largest after that of China in terms of active military officers serving in it.
• US Army’s Challenges After the American Civil War The problem was caused by the use of contaminated water, poor sanitation at the camps, and general lack of hygiene among the soldiers because of the nature of the battle.
• Army Knowledge Online: Benefits and Flaws The efficiency and effectiveness of the rehabilitation and diagnosis of the soldiers that have been wounded in the field have been augmented through the AKO application of Wounded Warrior.
• United States Army Participation in Indian Removal The role of the United States army in the implementation of this treaty was to eject the Indians from the designated parcels of land and force them to Indian reserves which had been prepared for […]
• Real Irish Republican Army RIRA resisted the division of the Republic of Ireland in order to create Northern Ireland. The mission of RIRA is to protect the sovereignty of the Republic of Ireland.
• Contemporary Terrorism: The American Army Special Forces This unit is among the 8 units of the Navy SEALs and it is also known as the ‘rainbow’. The unit is normally under the Joint Special Operations Command and under the command of the […]
• Internet Usage and Privacy in the Army Historically, the army had been banned from the use of the internet for communication or for socialization. From this time onwards, the army has been able to use the internet for communication and well as […]
• Organizational Communication in the U.S. Army Communication can be defined as the process through which information is effectively transmitted from the sender to the receiver using a medium of exchange; for an effective communication, the parties to the communication should be […]
• Army Knowledge Online Web Service’ Effectiveness Army web-based information service and the world’s largest intranet which is used for recruiting and provides the public information about the different organizations and documents.
• The Art of Being a Leader in Today’s Army Besides, the art of being the great leader in today’s Army is about the ability to create the climate of participation and dedication to the mission among the subordinates.
• Provisional Irish Republican Army The partition of the country into two marked the beginning of violence in the country since the natives were opposed to the move.
• Political Sciences: The United States Army This is in line with the embrace of professionalism in the army as embedded in the rules that guide the operation of the United States Army.
• Cost Allocation in US Army The main reason why cost allocation is done from a federal point of view is to ensure that the cost of running projects is distributed equitably.
• Ministry of Defence in the UK: The Army 2020 Programme The paper examines the different ways in which the workforce is most effective, how the army currently operates in the UK and how the changes envisaged through the Army 2020 Programme are going to impact […]
• American Army First Strategic Operations In particular, one can mention that in both cases, the speed of operations and mobility of forces was of great importance to the commanders.
• Role of the Army Staff Major Throughout the history of the United States Army, the army staff sergeant major has been considered as the head of the noncommissioned officers.
• WW II and Hitler’s Army After the massive defeat and deaths of the German army in the war that took place in the eastern side, it was evident that the traditional groups of the army were no longer working as […]
• ‘Belief in Action: The Salvation Army, a Global Not-for-Profit Organization’ Strategic planning goes through a process from setting the mission, objectives, situation analysis, strategy creation, execution and finally control so as to achieve positive results and an effective plan of action.”Strategic planning is inextricably interwoven […]
• Command Culture: US and German Army In the book, Muth introduces the concept of Command Culture and how it was effective in assisting the German Soldiers during the war.
• The US Army Corps of Engineers The subcommittee on interior and the environment manages the management of the affairs of the agency in terms of budgetary allocations.
• The Post-War Army: Problems New and Old The griffin novels tell us more about the lives of the soldiers and their roles in the various wars, than the events of the actual wars.
• British Army in Afghanistan The war in Afghanistan started with the conflicts between the British army and the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban group as the supporters of Al-Qaeda squad.
• Sustainability Reporting of the Australian Red Cross and the Australian Salvation Army This means that the organization explains to its stakeholders what it does to the community and the stakeholders get a chance to verify the information as they are members of the society.
• Colonel in the U.S. Army Triplet and Ferrell, assert that a colonel in the United States army is an esteemed individual in the army and the society at large.
• Leading Change US Army’s Need for Change In addition to that, the team members underwent training to broadly understand the context of the change effort, the basic structure of the organization, and the basic reasons for initiating change.
• Melbourne: Army Recruitment The marketing team should comprise of officers within the same age bracket, this will trigger the eagerness of the young candidates to join their fellows hence work extra hard to achieve the requirements.
• Uganda’s Brutal Lord’s Resistance Army The group is opposed to the Uganda government and the government has responded with a large-scale violence against it and the people of Northern Uganda; the government has also marginalized parts of northern Uganda occupied […]
• Drug Testing in the US Army Despite numerous ethical controversies, drug testing is essential for the lives and wellbeing of U.S.soldiers and those working in the United States Army. From the viewpoint of deontology, drug abuse is a direct violation of […]
• How Failure to Report Affects the Army The army of a country can be defined as the military unit charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the country’s land and air borders. Combat and other ranks of soldiers have vital information that can […]
• US Army Decision Making Style US Army is the largest department of the United States Armed forces; leaders in the institution have to make decisions to address day-to-day operation of the department.
• The Profession of Arms: The US Army During this time, the army has lost some of its tradition and skills; factors that used to make the army to be effective and efficient in its operations.
• The Effects of the US Army Corp Engineers Lock and Dam System on Recreation The paper also gives the reasons as to why the Corps of Engineers came up with the idea of building the locks and dams and thus their main mission and reasons for the facilities and […]
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100+ Military Essay Topics

The military, with its history, disciplines, strategies, and controversial issues, has always been a fascinating subject for both scholars and ordinary citizens. It’s no wonder that many students, whether they have military experience or are merely curious about the topic, choose to write essays about it.

Table of Contents

What is a Military Essay?

A military essay is a piece of writing that delves into topics related to the armed forces, defense strategies, historical battles, military ethics, the role of the military in national and international politics, and more. These essays can be analytical, argumentative, historical, or even personal, reflecting on one’s own experiences in the military. The objective of such an essay is to shed light on specific issues or to present a balanced argument about a controversial military topic.

A Quick Guide on How to Choose a Military Essay Topic

Selecting the right topic is crucial for any essay, and when it comes to military subjects, the stakes are even higher. Here’s a quick guide:

• Interest is Key: Choose a topic that genuinely interests you. Your enthusiasm will reflect in your writing.
• Relevance Matters: Ensure that the topic is relevant to the current socio-political climate or has historical significance.
• Research is Crucial: Before settling on a topic, do preliminary research to ensure there’s enough material available.
• Seek Diversity: Don’t just stick to the mainstream topics. Explore lesser-known events, strategies, or personal narratives.

Military Essay Topics to Consider:

Historical analysis.

• The impact of World War II on modern military strategies.
• The evolution of naval warfare: From wooden ships to nuclear submarines.
• How the Cold War shaped military alliances and strategies.

Ethics and Morality

• The moral implications of using drones in warfare.
• Child soldiers: Understanding the tragedy and solutions.
• The balance between national security and personal freedom in times of war.

Modern Warfare and Strategies

• Cybersecurity and the new age of digital warfare.
• The role of artificial intelligence in modern military tactics.
• Understanding the military-industrial complex in the 21st century.

Role in Society

• Women in the military: Breaking barriers and challenges faced.
• How veterans reintegrate into civilian life and the challenges they encounter.
• The impact of compulsory military service on societal structures.

International Relations and Politics

• The role of NATO in today’s geopolitical landscape.
• The military strategies of emerging superpowers.
• Evaluating the pros and cons of military interventions.

Equipment and Technology

• The evolution and impact of stealth technology in aerial warfare.
• The role of satellites in modern military intelligence.
• Nuclear deterrence: More of a threat or a necessity?

Training and Discipline

• Analyzing the rigorous training regimens of elite military units.
• The importance of psychological preparation in military training.
• The role of discipline in shaping a soldier’s life and career.

Personal Narratives

• Personal experiences of soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
• The role of chaplains in providing spiritual support in warfare.
• A day in the life of an army medic: Challenges and rewards.

Historical Perspectives

• The transformation of military strategies from ancient to modern times.
• The tactics and impact of guerrilla warfare throughout history.
• Military lessons from the Vietnam War.
• The influence of the Napoleonic Wars on contemporary warfare.
• The Crusades: A military and religious expedition.

Current Affairs and Modern Challenges

• The implications of North Korea’s military ambitions.
• The changing face of terrorism and its impact on global military strategies.
• The role of the U.S. military in global peacekeeping.
• China’s military expansion in the South China Sea.
• The future of warfare: Bio-weapons and other unconventional threats.

Technology and Innovation

• The challenges and benefits of integrating robotics into the battlefield.
• The evolution of military communication systems.
• The potential and ethics of genetically modified soldiers.
• How military tech influences civilian technology.
• The impact of space exploration on military aspirations.

Ethics, Morals, and Laws of War

• Torture in war: An in-depth ethical analysis.
• The use of chemical weapons: History and repercussions.
• The Geneva Conventions and their modern relevance.
• The thin line between soldiers and war criminals.
• Are there ever justifiable reasons for breaking the rules of war?

Societal Impacts and Military Influence

• The economic consequences of maintaining a large standing army.
• Propaganda and its role in military recruitment.
• How the military influences fashion and popular culture.
• The psychological impact of war on soldiers and civilians.
• Veterans and PTSD: The silent battle after war.

Training, Leadership, and Military Culture

• The physical and mental challenges of Navy SEAL training.
• The influence of ancient Spartan culture on modern military training.
• Leadership lessons from military generals.
• The concept of honor and valor in the military.
• The importance of camaraderie and brotherhood in military units.

Military Intelligence and Espionage

• The history and evolution of military codes and code breaking.
• Espionage during the Cold War: The silent heroes and villains.
• How technology is changing the face of military intelligence.
• Counterintelligence: Protecting secrets in a digital age.
• The challenges and successes of the CIA and MI6.

Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion

• The history of women’s roles in the military.
• Addressing LGBTQ+ rights within the armed forces.
• Challenges faced by minority groups in the military.
• The benefits of a diverse and inclusive military force.
• Gender roles and stereotypes in the military.

Military in Literature and Media

• The portrayal of war in classic literature.
• War movies: How Hollywood shapes our view of conflict.
• The role of war correspondents and their influence on public opinion.
• Military-themed video games: Edutainment or glorification of violence?
• The accuracy of military portrayals in popular TV shows.

International Policies and Alliances

• The history and future of NATO in global politics.
• Military neutrality: The case of Switzerland.
• The pros and cons of global disarmament treaties.
• The challenges of peacekeeping missions: A UN perspective.
• The role of the military in post-colonial African states.

Military Medical Practices

• Battlefield medicine: Evolution and advancements.
• The ethical dilemmas of triage in wartime.
• The development and importance of military nursing.
• Psychological support systems for soldiers in combat zones.
• Combatting epidemics in military camps: Historical and modern perspectives.

Strategic Defense and Military Installations

• The architecture and design of historical fortresses.
• The importance of military bases in foreign territories.
• Underground bunkers and their strategic significance.
• The role and evolution of aircraft carriers in naval warfare.
• Missile defense systems: Balancing offense and defense.

Military Traditions and Rituals

• The history and significance of military parades.
• Taps and the Last Post: Understanding military funerals.
• The tradition of military tattoos and their meanings.
• Rites of passage in different military cultures.
• Military awards and decorations: More than just medals.

Reserve and Paramilitary Forces

• The role of National Guard units in domestic emergencies.
• Comparing regular armies with reserve forces: Training, roles, and challenges.
• The significance and operations of the Coast Guard.
• Paramilitary forces and their impact on national security.
• Militias and their influence on geopolitical stability.

Military in Environmental Contexts

• Desert warfare: Challenges and strategies.
• The intricacies of jungle warfare and its historical significance.
• Arctic and mountain warfare: Overcoming nature’s harshest challenges.
• The environmental impact of military activities.
• Adapting military strategies for urban vs. rural combat scenarios.

Boost Your Military Essay with WriteOnDeadline!

Having difficulty bringing your military essay to life? At writeondeadline.com , we have a team of expert writers who can craft a compelling essay for you. Whether it’s thorough research, captivating storytelling, or an in-depth analysis you need, our professionals have got you covered. Dive deep into the discipline of defense with our top-notch writing services.

Useful References:

• U.S. Military History – An in-depth resource on the history of the U.S. Army.
• International Review of the Red Cross – A journal covering humanitarian law, policy, and action.
• RAND Corporation – Provides research and analysis on defense and security topics.
• Military Times – Offers up-to-date news and analysis on military issues.

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 perfect persuasive essay topics for any assignment.

General Education

Do you need to write a persuasive essay but aren’t sure what topic to focus on? Were you thrilled when your teacher said you could write about whatever you wanted but are now overwhelmed by the possibilities? We’re here to help!

Read on for a list of 113 top-notch persuasive essay topics, organized into ten categories. To help get you started, we also discuss what a persuasive essay is, how to choose a great topic, and what tips to keep in mind as you write your persuasive essay.

What Is a Persuasive Essay?

In a persuasive essay, you attempt to convince readers to agree with your point of view on an argument. For example, an essay analyzing changes in Italian art during the Renaissance wouldn’t be a persuasive essay, because there’s no argument, but an essay where you argue that Italian art reached its peak during the Renaissance would be a persuasive essay because you’re trying to get your audience to agree with your viewpoint.

Persuasive and argumentative essays both try to convince readers to agree with the author, but the two essay types have key differences. Argumentative essays show a more balanced view of the issue and discuss both sides. Persuasive essays focus more heavily on the side the author agrees with. They also often include more of the author’s opinion than argumentative essays, which tend to use only facts and data to support their argument.

All persuasive essays have the following:

• Introduction: Introduces the topic, explains why it’s important, and ends with the thesis.
• Thesis: A sentence that sums up what the essay be discussing and what your stance on the issue is.
• Reasons you believe your side of the argument: Why do you support the side you do? Typically each main point will have its own body paragraph.
• Evidence supporting your argument: Facts or examples to back up your main points. Even though your opinion is allowed in persuasive essays more than most other essays, having concrete examples will make a stronger argument than relying on your opinion alone.
• Conclusion: Restatement of thesis, summary of main points, and a recap of why the issue is important.

What Makes a Good Persuasive Essay Topic?

Theoretically, you could write a persuasive essay about any subject under the sun, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Certain topics are easier to write a strong persuasive essay on, and below are tips to follow when deciding what you should write about.

It’s a Topic You Care About

Obviously, it’s possible to write an essay about a topic you find completely boring. You’ve probably done it! However, if possible, it’s always better to choose a topic that you care about and are interested in. When this is the case, you’ll find doing the research more enjoyable, writing the essay easier, and your writing will likely be better because you’ll be more passionate about and informed on the topic.

You Have Enough Evidence to Support Your Argument

Just being passionate about a subject isn’t enough to make it a good persuasive essay topic, though. You need to make sure your argument is complex enough to have at least two potential sides to root for, and you need to be able to back up your side with evidence and examples. Even though persuasive essays allow your opinion to feature more than many other essays, you still need concrete evidence to back up your claims, or you’ll end up with a weak essay.

For example, you may passionately believe that mint chocolate chip ice cream is the best ice cream flavor (I agree!), but could you really write an entire essay on this? What would be your reasons for believing mint chocolate chip is the best (besides the fact that it’s delicious)? How would you support your belief? Have enough studies been done on preferred ice cream flavors to support an entire essay? When choosing a persuasive essay idea, you want to find the right balance between something you care about (so you can write well on it) and something the rest of the world cares about (so you can reference evidence to strengthen your position).

It’s a Manageable Topic

Bigger isn’t always better, especially with essay topics. While it may seem like a great idea to choose a huge, complex topic to write about, you’ll likely struggle to sift through all the information and different sides of the issue and winnow them down to one streamlined essay. For example, choosing to write an essay about how WWII impacted American life more than WWI wouldn’t be a great idea because you’d need to analyze all the impacts of both the wars in numerous areas of American life. It’d be a huge undertaking. A better idea would be to choose one impact on American life the wars had (such as changes in female employment) and focus on that. Doing so will make researching and writing your persuasive essay much more feasible.

List of 113 Good Persuasive Essay Topics

Below are over 100 persuasive essay ideas, organized into ten categories. When you find an idea that piques your interest, you’ll choose one side of it to argue for in your essay. For example, if you choose the topic, “should fracking be legal?” you’d decide whether you believe fracking should be legal or illegal, then you’d write an essay arguing all the reasons why your audience should agree with you.

Arts/Culture

• Should students be required to learn an instrument in school?
• Did the end of Game of Thrones fit with the rest of the series?
• Can music be an effective way to treat mental illness?
• With e-readers so popular, have libraries become obsolete?
• Are the Harry Potter books more popular than they deserve to be?
• Should music with offensive language come with a warning label?
• What’s the best way for museums to get more people to visit?
• Should students be able to substitute an art or music class for a PE class in school?
• Are the Kardashians good or bad role models for young people?
• Should people in higher income brackets pay more taxes?
• Should all high school students be required to take a class on financial literacy?
• Is it possible to achieve the American dream, or is it only a myth?
• Is it better to spend a summer as an unpaid intern at a prestigious company or as a paid worker at a local store/restaurant?
• Should the United States impose more or fewer tariffs?
• Should college graduates have their student loans forgiven?
• Should restaurants eliminate tipping and raise staff wages instead?
• Should students learn cursive writing in school?
• Which is more important: PE class or music class?
• Is it better to have year-round school with shorter breaks throughout the year?
• Should class rank be abolished in schools?
• Should students be taught sex education in school?
• Should students be able to attend public universities for free?
• What’s the most effective way to change the behavior of school bullies?
• Are the SAT and ACT accurate ways to measure intelligence?
• Should students be able to learn sign language instead of a foreign language?
• Do the benefits of Greek life at colleges outweigh the negatives?
• Does doing homework actually help students learn more?
• Why do students in many other countries score higher than American students on math exams?
• Should parents/teachers be able to ban certain books from schools?
• What’s the best way to reduce cheating in school?
• Should colleges take a student’s race into account when making admissions decisions?
• Should there be limits to free speech?
• Should students be required to perform community service to graduate high school?
• Should convicted felons who have completed their sentence be allowed to vote?
• Should gun ownership be more tightly regulated?
• Should recycling be made mandatory?
• Should employers be required to offer paid leave to new parents?
• Are there any circumstances where torture should be allowed?
• Should children under the age of 18 be able to get plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons?
• Should white supremacy groups be allowed to hold rallies in public places?
• Does making abortion illegal make women more or less safe?
• Does foreign aid actually help developing countries?
• Are there times a person’s freedom of speech should be curtailed?
• Should people over a certain age not be allowed to adopt children?

Government/Politics

• Should the minimum voting age be raised/lowered/kept the same?
• Should Puerto Rico be granted statehood?
• Should the United States build a border wall with Mexico?
• Who should be the next person printed on American banknotes?
• Should the United States’ military budget be reduced?
• Did China’s one child policy have overall positive or negative impacts on the country?
• Should DREAMers be granted US citizenship?
• Is national security more important than individual privacy?
• What responsibility does the government have to help homeless people?
• Should the electoral college be abolished?
• Should the US increase or decrease the number of refugees it allows in each year?
• Should privately-run prisons be abolished?
• Who was the most/least effective US president?
• Will Brexit end up helping or harming the UK?

• What’s the best way to reduce the spread of Ebola?
• Is the Keto diet a safe and effective way to lose weight?
• Should the FDA regulate vitamins and supplements more strictly?
• Should public schools require all students who attend to be vaccinated?
• Is eating genetically modified food safe?
• What’s the best way to make health insurance more affordable?
• What’s the best way to lower the teen pregnancy rate?
• Should recreational marijuana be legalized nationwide?
• Should birth control pills be available without a prescription?
• Should pregnant women be forbidden from buying cigarettes and alcohol?
• Why has anxiety increased in adolescents?
• Are low-carb or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• What caused the destruction of the USS Maine?
• Was King Arthur a mythical legend or actual Dark Ages king?
• Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs during WWII?
• What was the primary cause of the Rwandan genocide?
• What happened to the settlers of the Roanoke colony?
• Was disagreement over slavery the primary cause of the US Civil War?
• What has caused the numerous disappearances in the Bermuda triangle?
• Should nuclear power be banned?
• Is scientific testing on animals necessary?
• Do zoos help or harm animals?
• Should scientists be allowed to clone humans?
• Should animals in circuses be banned?
• Should fracking be legal?
• Should people be allowed to keep exotic animals as pets?
• What’s the best way to reduce illegal poaching in Africa?
• What is the best way to reduce the impact of global warming?
• Should euthanasia be legalized?
• Is there legitimate evidence of extraterrestrial life?
• Should people be banned from owning aggressive dog breeds?
• Should the United States devote more money towards space exploration?
• Should the government subsidize renewable forms of energy?
• Is solar energy worth the cost?
• Should stem cells be used in medicine?
• Is it right for the US to leave the Paris Climate Agreement?
• Should athletes who fail a drug test receive a lifetime ban from the sport?
• Should college athletes receive a salary?
• Should the NFL do more to prevent concussions in players?
• Do PE classes help students stay in shape?
• Should horse racing be banned?
• Should cheerleading be considered a sport?
• Should children younger than 18 be allowed to play tackle football?
• Are the costs of hosting an Olympic Games worth it?
• Can online schools be as effective as traditional schools?
• Do violent video games encourage players to be violent in real life?
• Should facial recognition technology be banned?
• Does excessive social media use lead to depression/anxiety?
• Has the rise of translation technology made knowing multiple languages obsolete?
• Was Steve Jobs a visionary or just a great marketer?
• Should social media be banned for children younger than a certain age?
• Which 21st-century invention has had the largest impact on society?
• Are ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft good or bad for society?
• Should Facebook have done more to protect the privacy of its users?
• Will technology end up increasing or decreasing inequality worldwide?

Tips for Writing a Strong Persuasive Essay

After you’ve chosen the perfect topic for your persuasive essay, your work isn’t over. Follow the three tips below to create a top-notch essay.

Do Your Research

Your argument will fall apart if you don’t fully understand the issue you’re discussing or you overlook an important piece of it. Readers won’t be convinced by someone who doesn’t know the subject, and you likely won’t persuade any of them to begin supporting your viewpoint. Before you begin writing a single word of your essay, research your topic thoroughly. Study different sources, learn about the different sides of the argument, ask anyone who’s an expert on the topic what their opinion is, etc. You might be tempted to start writing right away, but by doing your research, you’ll make the writing process much easier when the time comes.

Make Your Thesis Perfect

Your thesis is the most important sentence in your persuasive essay. Just by reading that single sentence, your audience should know exactly what topic you’ll be discussing and where you stand on the issue. You want your thesis to be crystal clear and to accurately set up the rest of your essay. Asking classmates or your teacher to look it over before you begin writing the rest of your essay can be a big help if you’re not entirely confident in your thesis.

Consider the Other Side

You’ll spend most of your essay focusing on your side of the argument since that’s what you want readers to come away believing. However, don’t think that means you can ignore other sides of the issue. In your essay, be sure to discuss the other side’s argument, as well as why you believe this view is weak or untrue. Researching all the different viewpoints and including them in your essay will increase the quality of your writing by making your essay more complete and nuanced.

Summary: Persuasive Essay Ideas

Good persuasive essay topics can be difficult to come up with, but in this guide we’ve created a list of 113 excellent essay topics for you to browse. The best persuasive essay ideas will be those that you are interested in, have enough evidence to support your argument, and aren’t too complicated to be summarized in an essay.

After you’ve chosen your essay topic, keep these three tips in mind when you begin writing:

• Do your research
• Make your thesis perfect
• Consider the other side

What's Next?

Need ideas for a research paper topic as well? Our guide to research paper topics has over 100 topics in ten categories so you can be sure to find the perfect topic for you.

Thinking about taking an AP English class? Read our guide on AP English classes to learn whether you should take AP English Language or AP English Literature (or both!)

Deciding between the SAT or ACT? Find out for sure which you will do the best on . Also read a detailed comparison between the two tests .

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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100 Persuasive Essay Topics

• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Persuasive essays are a bit like argument essays and persuasive speeches , but they tend to be a little kinder and gentler. Argument essays require you to discuss and to attack an alternate view, while persuasive essays are attempts to convince the reader that you have a believable argument. In other words, you are an advocate, not an adversary.

A Persuasive Essay Has 3 Components

• Introduction : This is the opening paragraph of your essay. It contains the hook, which is used to grab the reader's attention, and the thesis, or argument, which you'll explain in the next section.
• Body : This is the heart of your essay, usually three to five paragraphs in length. Each paragraph examines one theme or issue used to support your thesis.
• Conclusion : This is the final paragraph of your essay. In it, you'll sum up the main points of the body and connect them to your thesis. Persuasive essays often use the conclusion as a last appeal to the audience.

Learning how to write a persuasive essay is an essential skill that people use every day in fields from business to law to media and entertainment. English students can begin writing a persuasive essay at any skill level. You're sure to find a sample topic or two from the list of 100 persuasive essays below, sorted by degree of difficulty.

Watch Now: 12 Ideas for Great Persuasive Essay Topics

• Kids should get paid for good grades.
• Students should have less homework.
• Snow days are great for family time.
• Penmanship is important.
• Short hair is better than long hair.
• We should all grow our own vegetables.
• We need more holidays.
• Aliens probably exist.
• Gym class is more important than music class.
• Kids should be able to vote.
• Kids should get paid for extra activities like sports.
• School should take place in the evenings.
• Country life is better than city life.
• City life is better than country life.
• We can change the world.
• Skateboard helmets should be mandatory.
• We should provide food for the poor.
• Children should be paid for doing chores.
• We should populate the moon .
• Dogs make better pets than cats.

Intermediate

• The government should impose household trash limits.
• Nuclear weapons are an effective deterrent against foreign attack.
• Teens should be required to take parenting classes.
• We should teach etiquette in schools.
• School uniform laws are unconstitutional.
• All students should wear uniforms.
• Too much money is a bad thing.
• High schools should offer specialized degrees in arts or sciences.
• Magazine advertisements send unhealthy signals to young women.
• Robocalling should be outlawed.
• Age 12 is too young to babysit.
• Children should be required to read more.
• All students should be given the opportunity to study abroad.
• Yearly driving tests should be mandatory past age 65.
• Cell phones should never be used while driving.
• All schools should implement bullying awareness programs.
• Bullies should be kicked out of school.
• Parents of bullies should have to pay a fine.
• The school year should be longer.
• School days should start later.
• Teens should be able to choose their bedtime.
• There should be a mandatory entrance exam for high school.
• Public transit should be privatized.
• We should allow pets in school.
• The voting age should be lowered to 16.
• Beauty contests are bad for body image.
• Every American should learn to speak Spanish.
• Every immigrant should learn to speak English.
• Video games can be educational.
• College athletes should be paid for their services.
• We need a military draft .
• Professional sports should eliminate cheerleaders.
• Teens should be able to start driving at 14 instead of 16.
• Year-round school is a bad idea.
• High school campuses should be guarded by police officers.
• The legal drinking age should be lowered to 19.
• Kids under 15 shouldn't have Facebook pages.
• Standardized testing should be eliminated.
• Teachers should be paid more.
• There should be one world currency.
• Domestic surveillance without a warrant should be legal.
• Letter grades should be replaced with a pass or fail.
• Every family should have a natural disaster survival plan.
• Parents should talk to kids about drugs at a young age.
• Racial slurs should be illegal.
• Gun ownership should be tightly regulated.
• Puerto Rico should be granted statehood.
• People should go to jail when they abandon their pets.
• Free speech should have limitations.
• Members of Congress should be subject to term limits.
• Recycling should be mandatory for everyone.
• High-speed internet access should be regulated like a public utility.
• Yearly driving tests should be mandatory for the first five years after getting a license.
• Recreational marijuana should be made legal nationwide.
• Legal marijuana should be taxed and regulated like tobacco or alcohol.
• Child support dodgers should go to jail.
• Students should be allowed to pray in school.
• All Americans have a constitutional right to health care.
• Internet access should be free for everyone.
• Social Security should be privatized.
• Pregnant couples should receive parenting lessons.
• We shouldn't use products made from animals.
• Celebrities should have more privacy rights.
• Professional football is too violent and should be banned.
• We need better sex education in schools.
• School testing is not effective.
• The United States should build a border wall with Mexico and with Canada.
• Life is better than it was 50 years ago.
• Eating meat is unethical.
• A vegan diet is the only diet people should follow.
• Medical testing on animals should be illegal.
• The Electoral College is outdated.
• Medical testing on animals is necessary.
• Public safety is more important than an individual's right to privacy.
• Single-sex colleges provide a better education.
• Books should never be banned.
• Violent video games can cause people to act violently in real life.
• Freedom of religion has limitations.
• Nuclear power should be illegal.
• Climate change should be the president's primary political concern.
• Arizona State University Writing Center staff. " Persuasive Essay Structure ." ASU.edu, June 2012.
• Collins, Jen, and Polak, Adam. " Persuasive Essays ." Hamilton.edu.
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• Essay Contest Call for Submissions: Solving the Military Recruiting Crisis

MWI Staff | 07.19.23

Update: We’re thrilled to announce that the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has joined the Modern War Institute in organizing this essay contest and evaluating submissions. In addition to the top essays being published by the Modern War Institute, authors of the best submissions will have an opportunity to discuss their ideas with TRADOC senior leaders. TRADOC will also review all essays to evaluate their contributions to resolving the military recruiting crisis.

Essay requirements and the submission deadline remain the same, and authors who have already submitted their entries should not resubmit.

“Credible defense begins with our ability to steadily attract and retain the men and women who would assume the initial burden of a fast breaking war.” More than forty years ago, Vice Admiral Robert B. Pirie, Jr. eloquently described why recruiting was a national security issue.

This year, the Army will again fail to meet recruiting goals after falling fifteen thousand short last year. Likewise, the Navy anticipates falling six thousand sailors short of its target. The Air Force has issues too , with Secretary Frank Kendall acknowledging in March that his service would fall 10 percent short this year. Except for the two smallest services—the Marine Corps and Space Force—the United States’ armed forces continue to face recruiting woes.

With this serious issue as a backdrop, the Modern War Institute and the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) are launching an essay contest that seeks to explore the problem and identify solutions that could help the services address it.

Essay Prompt

Essays must answer the following prompt: What novel approaches can the United States military employ to solve the recruiting crisis?

This topic is broad. Essays might address new incentives, lessons from other countries or uniformed services, the impact of telework, messaging and marketing, how to resolve tensions created by years of recruiting shortfalls, ideas from labor economics or other academic fields, historical perspectives on recruiting challenges and solutions, or other ideas related to recruiting. Essays can take any form, to include speculative fiction. However, because of length limits, we strongly encourage authors to clearly articulate one idea or concept in their responses to the prompt.

Your ideas will inform internal conversations and workshops in support of the Modern War Institute’s human resources research theme. Based on the ideas presented in their essays, authors may be invited to contribute to future MWI publications or events on this topic.

Eligibility

• Essays will be accepted from any person in any field, and submissions from non-US participants are welcomed.
• Up to two people may coauthor an essay entry.
• Participants may submit only one entry to the competition.
• Essays must be original, unpublished, and not subject to publication elsewhere.
• Essays will not exceed 1,500 words.
• Use the standard submission guidelines for the Modern War Institute.
• Email your entry to [email protected] with “ Recruiting Essay Competition ” in the subject line. Once submitted, no edits, corrections, or changes are allowed.
• Submission deadline: essays will be accepted until 11:59 PM EDT on September 3, 2023.

Selection Process

Submissions will be reviewed and evaluated by a team from the Modern War Institute and TRADOC. Submissions will be assessed based on how well and creatively they address the topic of the contest and provoke further thought and conversation, as well as their suitability for publication by the Modern War Institute (e.g., style, sources, accessibility, etc.). Evaluation criteria include:

• Does the essay clearly define a problem and present a solution?
• Does the essay show thoughtful analysis?
• Does the essay inject new provocative thinking or address areas where there needs to be more discussion?
• Does the essay demonstrate a unique approach or improve current initiatives?
• Does the essay take lessons from history and apply them to today’s challenges?
• Is the essay logically organized, well written, and persuasive?

Winning Submissions

The top three essays will be announced publicly and will be published by the Modern War Institute. Depending on the evaluation of the Modern War Institute editorial team, revisions may be required before publication.

Additionally, the authors of the top submissions with senior leaders from TRADOC and the US Army’s Recruiting Command. Furthermore, TRADOC will review all essays to support the Army’s recruiting efforts.

Image credit: Spc. Kelsea Cook, Indiana National Guard

Although I am not much of an essay writer, perhaps the thesis, etc.. that I provide below will allow someone — who is a decent essay writer — to develop and provide a good essay for this competition. Here goes:

First, the essay prompt/question: "What novel approaches can the United States military employ to solve the recruiting crisis?"

Next, the proposed answer to this such essay prompt/question:

In order for the United States military to solve its current recruiting problems, the United States military must become able — in some way, shape or form — to better assure potential military recruits — and their families and friends — that they (these potential military recruits) will now (a) be less likely to be used to prosecute unnecessary, improper, ill-advised and/or ill-conceived and executed engagements and wars and, thus, will now (b) be less likely to find themselves in a position to be badly injured and/or killed in such unnecessary, improper, ill-advised, etc., engagements and wars.

(Herein to note that this such thesis and approach takes direct aim at the our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of late and, thus, potentially gets directly to the/a true "root cause" of our current recruiting problems?)

It is not so much the fact that potential military recruits — and their families and friends — are unlikely to join/want their children and friends to join because they understand that these children and/or friends might get seriously injured and/or kill while engaged in our military profession.

Rather it is the fact that these such potential military recruits — and their families and friends — are unlikely to join/want their children and friends to join because they see the trend (think Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) wherein these such injuries and deaths were/are incurred in what now is considered to be unnecessary, improper, ill-advised and/or ill-conceived and executed engagements and wars.

(Herein, it will be important to address the "common nature" of these such unnecessary, improper, Ill-advised, etc., engagements and wars — this being — that they were ultimately undertaken to achieve "revolutionary" political, economic, social and value "change" in the states and societies of the world — that is — states and societies in the world who are most different from ultra-modern "us.")

Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:

Today's recruiting problems, thus I believe, can be traced to the fact that our potential military recruits — and their families and friends — :

a. Do not agree with the "transformative" political objective of the United States post-the Old Cold War and/or:

b. Do not agree with the manner (war; military engagement) in which the U.S. has chosen to pursue this such — "transformative" — post-Cold War political objective.

B.C I believe after reading this long-winded comment. That you have a problem with Americas terrible policy and foreign policy decisions. You of course would be correct. For the same reasons they can't figure out foreign policy, our leaders can't figure out Retention and Recruitment problems. In both cases the American people are becoming aware that little of the decisions being made are done to benefit the country as a whole. Instead, they are to line the pockets of certain individuals and companies. For example, the Ukraine conflict, Billions of taxpayer dollars for no strategic goal or benefit. This coming off the back side of 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan which obviously served little purpose at this point. Where is Kurdistan? Was Dick Chaney ever charged? There are many more such examples. But to your original point, I would believe that contest submissions would need to limit the material to only what the military itself could do to correct the recruitment shortfalls.

Don't worry. I wrote a very direct but elligent version of thus. You're welcome. Shoot me an email if you want it, [email protected]

Bring back the 6 month active duty with 4 years active reserve and free college education.

So, when it is time to combat, they will retreat with the excuse that I got in to get the college, not to go to war. My father (RIP) lived this cluster, and it was ridiculous seen young men and women played the Army. My son and I did active duty, did the required services, and every time that we hear the national anthem "of the land of the brave", we meant it. We never embrace college free benefits to defend our nation. and money

If you would like access to at least 250 papers on this topic get with the Sergeants Major Academy. Class 73 wrote a lot on this topic between white paper, capstone papers, and possibly a focus papers.

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RCL Blogs: Jamie Lynch

CAS137H-007 with Dr. Bodaski

RCL Blog #3 – Persuasive Essay Proposal

For my persuasive essay, I will be taking the stance that “the NRA should back mandating the use of smart gun technology for all handguns in order to limit unregulated circulation of firearms.” This is a question of policy that deals with something called “ghost guns,” which are privately made, untraceable firearms. I am interested in going into more depth about this topic due to my proximity to New York city, and my observation in the rise in crime. I don’t feel as safe going into the city as I did many years ago, and this, in large part, is a result of increased firearm use on subway platforms. I also feel strongly about gun control as a whole, and how it needs to be stronger. Far too many communities, synogogues, supermarkets and schools have been targets of terrorist attacks. I would like to look deeper into legislation that has been made against illegal weapons, and what has yet to be passed. 

For my body paragraphs, I will first discuss what ghost guns are in general, and why they are an increasing problem in American cities. This will set the basis for my argument to the NRA, giving context and explaining why advocacy for new legislation needs to be promoted. 

The next part of my argument will introduce “smart gun” technology, and explain why this is a feasbile way to regulate ghost guns. Smart gun technology requires a fingerprint before use of the firearm. If the original purchaser of a ghost gun kit tries to use the gun, they will be unable to. Furthermore, if the original user of the weapon is a known criminal, their fingerprint will register and he/she will also be unable to access the artillery. 

The final body paragraph will be about punishments for those caught with ghost guns, and will cite current legislation that has already been passed. This will reinforce the argument that certain shootings can, in fact, be stopped through increased regulation. 

The book that I chose to use for my research is called “ Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem” by Anthony A. Braga and Phillip J. Cook. This will serve beneficial for my research because it was published this past year, and addresses ghost guns, smart gun technologies, and crie rates in cities. The authors are a criminology professor and a professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke, respectively.

The three research questions that will guide my issue brief are: How big of an impact are ghost guns having in cities? Is mandating smart gun technology feasible on unregulated guns? What can the NRA do to encourage or mandate such legislation?

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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Ethan Mollick

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Ethan Mollick. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?

Give your a.i. a personality, spend 10 hours experimenting, and other practical tips from ethan mollick..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

This feels wrong to me. But I have checked the dates. It was barely more than a year ago that I wrote this piece about A.I., with the title “This Changes Everything.” I ended up reading it on the show, too. And the piece was about the speed with which A.I. systems were improving. It argued that we can usually trust that tomorrow is going to be roughly like today, that next year is going to be roughly like this year. That’s not what we’re seeing here. These systems are growing in power and capabilities at an astonishing rate.

The growth is exponential, not linear. When you look at surveys of A.I. researchers, their timeline for how quickly A.I. is going to be able to do basically anything a human does better and more cheaply than a human — that timeline is accelerating, year by year, on these surveys. When I do my own reporting, talking to the people inside these companies, people at this strange intersection of excited and terrified of what they’re building, no one tells me they are seeing a reason to believe progress is going to slow down.

And you might think that’s just hype, but a lot of them want it to slow down. A lot of them are scared of how quickly it is moving. They don’t think that society is ready for it, that regulation is ready for it. They think the competitive pressures between the companies and the countries are dangerous. They wish something would happen to make it all go slower. But what they are seeing is they are hitting the milestones faster, that we’re getting closer and closer to truly transformational A.I., that there is so much money and talent and attention flooding into the space that that is becoming its own accelerant. They are scared. We should at least be paying attention.

And yet, I find living in this moment really weird, because as much as I know this wildly powerful technology is emerging beneath my fingertips, as much as I believe it’s going to change the world I live in profoundly, I find it really hard to just fit it into my own day to day work. I consistently sort of wander up to the A.I., ask it a question, find myself somewhat impressed or unimpressed at the answer. But it doesn’t stick for me. It is not a sticky habit. It’s true for a lot of people I know.

And I think that failure matters. I think getting good at working with A.I. is going to be an important skill in the next few years. I think having an intuition for how these systems work is going to be important just for understanding what is happening to society. And you can’t do that if you don’t get over this hump in the learning curve, if you don’t get over this part where it’s not really clear how to make A.I. part of your life.

So I’ve been on a personal quest to get better at this. And in that quest, I have a guide. Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies and writes about innovation and entrepreneurship. But he has this newsletter, One Useful Thing, that has become, really, I think, the best guide how to begin using, and how to get better at using A.I. He’s also got a new book on the subject, “Co-Intelligence.” And so I asked him on the show to walk me through what he’s learned.

This is going to be, I should say, the first of three shows on this topic. This one is about the present. The next is about some things I’m very worried about in the near future, particularly around what A.I. is going to do to our digital commons. And then, we’re going to have a show that is a little bit more about the curve we are all on about the slightly further future, and the world we might soon be living in.

As always, my email for guest suggestions, thoughts, feedback, [email protected].

Ethan Mollick, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So let’s assume I’m interested in A.I. And I tried ChatGPT a bunch of times, and I was suitably impressed and weirded out for a minute. And so I know the technology is powerful. I’ve heard all these predictions about how it will take everything over, or become part of everything we do. But I don’t actually see how it fits into my life, really, at all. What am I missing?

So you’re not alone. This is actually very common. And I think part of the reason is that the way ChatGPT works isn’t really set up for you to understand how powerful it is. You really do need to use the paid version, they are significantly smarter. And you can almost think of this — like, GPT-3, which was — nobody really paid attention to when it came out, before ChatGPT, was about as good as a sixth grader at writing. GPT-3.5, the free version of ChatGPT, is about as good as a high school, or maybe even a college freshman or sophomore.

And GPT-4 is often as good as a Ph.D. in some forms of writing. Like, there’s a general smartness that increases. But even more than that, ability seems to increase. And you’re much more likely to get that feeling that you are working with something amazing as a result. And if you don’t work with the frontier models, you can lose track of what these systems can actually do. On top of that, you need to start just using it. You kind of have to push past those first three questions.

My advice is usually bring it to every table that you come to in a legal and ethical way. So I use it for every aspect of my job in ways that I legally and ethically can, and that’s how I learn what it’s good or bad at.

When you say, bring it to every table you’re at, one, that sounds like a big pain, because now I’ve got to add another step of talking to the computer constantly. But two, it’s just not obvious to me what that would look like. So what does it look like? What does it look like for you, or what does it look like for others — that you feel is applicable widely?

So I just finished this book. It’s my third book. I keep writing books, even though I keep forgetting that writing books is really hard. But this was, I think, my best book, but also the most interesting to write. And it was thanks to A.I. And there’s almost no A.I. writing in the book, but I used it continuously. So things that would get in the way of writing — I think I’m a much better writer than A.I. — hopefully, people agree. But there’s a lot of things that get in your way as a writer. So I would get stuck on a sentence. I couldn’t do a transition. Give me 30 versions of this sentence in radically different styles. There’s 200 different citations. I had the A.I. read through the papers that I read through, write notes on them, and organize them for me. I had the A.I. suggest analogies that might be useful. I had the A.I. act as readers, and in different personas, read through the paper from the perspective of, is there some example I could give that’s better? Is this understandable or not? And that’s very typical of the kind of way that I would, say, bring it to the table. Use it for everything, and you’ll find its limits and abilities.

Let me ask you one specific question on that, because I’ve been writing a book. And on some bad days of writing the book, I decided to play around with GPT-4. And of the things that it got me thinking about was the kind of mistake or problem these systems can help you see and the kind they can’t. So they can do a lot of, give me 15 versions of this paragraph, 30 versions of this sentence. And every once in a while, you get a good version or you’ll shake something a little bit loose.

But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.

And I actually worry a little bit about tools that can see one kind of problem and trick you into thinking it’s this easier problem, but make it actually harder for you to see the other kind of problem that maybe if you were just sitting there, banging your head against the wall of your computer, or the wall of your own mind, you would eventually find.

I think that’s a wise point. I think there’s two or three things bundled there. The first of those is A.I. is good, but it’s not as good as you. It is, say, at the 80th percentile of writers based on some results, maybe a little bit higher. In some ways, if it was able to have that burst of insight and to tell you this chapter is wrong, and I’ve thought of a new way of phrasing it, we would be at that sort of mythical AGI level of A.I. as smart as the best human. And it just isn’t yet.

I think the second issue is also quite profound, which is, what does using this tool shape us to do and not do? One nice example that you just gave is writing. And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think. And sometimes, getting that shortcut could shortcut the thinking process. So I’ve had to change sometimes a little bit how I think when I use A.I., for better or for worse. So I think these are both concerns to be taken seriously.

For most people — right, if you’re just going to pick one model, what would you pick? What do you recommend to people? And second, how do you recommend they access it? Because something going on in the A.I. world is there are a lot of wrappers on these models. So ChatGPT has an app. Claude does not have an app. Obviously, Google has its suite of products. And there are organizations that have created a different spin on somebody else’s A.I. — so Perplexity, which is, I believe, built on GPT-4 now, you can pay for it.

And it’s more like a search engine interface, and has some changes made to it. For a lot of people, the question of how easy and accessible the thing is to access really matters. So which model do you recommend to most people? And which entry door do you recommend to most people? And do they differ?

It’s a really good question. I recommend working with one of the models as directly as possible, through the company that creates them. And there’s a few reasons for that. One is you get as close to the unadulterated personality as possible. And second, that’s where features tend to roll out first. So if you like sort of intellectual challenge, I think Claude 3 is the most intellectual of the models, as you said.

The biggest capability set right now is GPT-4, so if you do any math or coding work, it does coding for you. It has some really interesting interfaces. That’s what I would use — and because GPT-5 is coming out, that’s fairly powerful. And Google is probably the most accessible, and plugged into the Google ecosystem. So I don’t think you can really go wrong with any of these. Generally, I think Claude 3 is the most likely to freak you out right now. And GPT-4 is probably the most likely to be super useful right now.

So you say it takes about 10 hours to learn a model. Ten hours is a long time, actually. What are you doing in that 10 hours? What are you figuring out? How did you come to that number? Give me some texture on your 10 hour rule.

So first off, I want to indicate the 10 hours is as arbitrary as 10,000 steps. Like, there’s no scientific basis for it. This is an observation. But it also does move you past the, I poked at this for an evening, and it moves you towards using this in a serious way. I don’t know if 10 hours is the real limit, but it seems to be somewhat transformative. The key is to use it in an area where you have expertise, so you can understand what it’s good or bad at, learn the shape of its capabilities.

When I taught my students this semester how to use A.I., and we had three classes on that, they learned the theory behind it. But then I gave them an assignment, which was to replace themselves at their next job. And they created amazing tools, things that filed flight plans or did tweeting, or did deal memos. In fact, one of the students created a way of creating user personas, which is something that you do in product development, that’s been used several thousand times in the last couple of weeks in different companies.

So they were able to figure out uses that I never thought of to automate their job and their work because they were asked to do that. So part of taking this seriously in the 10 hours is, you’re going to try and use it for your work. You’ll understand where it’s good or bad, what it can automate, what it can’t, and build from there.

Something that feels to me like a theme of your work is that the way to approach this is not learning a tool. It is building a relationship. Is that fair?

A.I. is built like a tool. It’s software. It’s very clear at this point that it’s an emulation of thought. But because of how it’s built, because of how it’s constructed, it is much more like working with a person than working with a tool. And when we talk about it this way, I almost feel kind of bad, because there’s dangers in building a relationship with a system that is purely artificial, and doesn’t think and have emotions. But honestly, that is the way to go forward. And that is sort of a great sin, anthropomorphization, in the A.I. literature, because it can blind you to the fact that this is software with its own sets of foibles and approaches.

But if you think about it like programming, then you end up in trouble. In fact, there’s some early evidence that programmers are the worst people at using A.I. because it doesn’t work like software. It doesn’t do the things you would expect a tool to do. Tools shouldn’t occasionally give you the wrong answer, shouldn’t give you different answers every time, shouldn’t insult you or try to convince you they love you.

And A.I.s do all of these things. And I find that teachers, managers, even parents, editors, are often better at using these systems, because they’re used to treating this as a person. And they interact with it like a person would, giving feedback. And that helps you. And I think the second piece of that “not tool” piece is that when I talk to OpenAI or Anthropic, they don’t have a hidden instruction manual. There is no list of how you should use this as a writer, or as a marketer, or as an educator. They don’t even know what the capabilities of these systems are. They’re all sort of being discovered together. And that is also not like a tool. It’s more like a person with capabilities that we don’t fully know yet.

So you’ve done this with all the big models. You’ve done, I think, much more than this, actually, with all the big models. And one thing you describe feeling is that they don’t just have slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but they have different — for lack of a better term, and to anthropomorphize — personalities, and that the 10 hours in part is about developing an intuition not just for how they work, but kind of how they are and how they talk, the sort of entity you’re dealing with.

So give me your high level on how GPT-4 and Claude 3 and Google’s Gemini are different. What are their personalities like to you?

It’s important to know the personalities not just as personalities, but because there are tricks. Those are tunable approaches that the system makers decide. So it’s weird to have this — in one hand, don’t anthropomorphize, because you’re being manipulated, because you are. But on the other hand, the only useful way is to anthropomorphize. So keep in mind that you are dealing with the choices of the makers.

So for example, Claude 3 is currently the warmest of the models. And it is the most allowed by its creators, Anthropic, I think, to act like a person. So it’s more willing to give you its personal views, such as they are. And again, those aren’t real views. Those are views to make you happy — than other models. And it’s a beautiful writer, very good at writing, kind of clever — closest to humor, I’ve found, of any of the A.I.s. Less dad jokes and more actual almost jokes.

GPT-4 feels like a workhorse at this point. It is the most neutral of the approaches. It wants to get stuff done for you. And it will happily do that. It doesn’t have a lot of time for chitchat. And then we’ve got Google’s Bard, which feels like — or Gemini now — which feels like it really, really wants to help. We use this for teaching a lot. And we build these scenarios where the A.I. actually acts like a counterparty in a negotiation. So you get to practice the negotiation by negotiating with the A.I. And it works incredibly well. I’ve been building simulations for 10 years, can’t imagine what a leap this has been. But when we try and get Google to do that, it keeps leaping in on the part of the students, to try and correct them and say, no, you didn’t really want to say this. You wanted to say that. And I’ll play out the scenario as if it went better. And it really wants to kind of make things good for you.

So these interactions with the A.I. do feel like you’re working with people, both in skills and in personality.

You were mentioning a minute ago that what the A.I.s do reflect decisions made by their programmers. They reflect guardrails, what they’re going to let the A.I. say. Very famously, Gemini came out and was very woke. You would ask it to show you a picture of soldiers in Nazi Germany, and it would give you a very multicultural group of soldiers, which is not how that army worked. But that was something that they had built in to try to make more inclusive photography generation.

But there are also things that happen in these systems that people don’t expect, that the programmers don’t understand. So I remember the previous generation of Claude, which is from Anthropic, that when it came out, something that the people around it talked about was, for some reason, Claude was just a little bit more literary than the other systems. It was better at rewriting things in the voices of literary figures. It just had a slightly artsier vibe.

And the people who trained it weren’t exactly sure why. Now, that still feels true to me. Right now, of the ones I’m using, I’m spending the most time with Claude 3. I just find it the most congenial. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, but there is a funny dimension to these where they are both reflecting the guardrails and the choices of the programmers. And then deep inside the training data, deep inside the way the various algorithms are combining, there is some set of emergent qualities to them, which gives them this at least edge of chance, of randomness, of something — yeah, that does feel almost like personality.

I think that’s a very important point. And fundamental about A.I. is the idea that we technically know how LLMs work, but we don’t know how they work the way they do, or why they’re as good as they are. They’re really — we don’t understand it. The theories range from everyone — from it’s all fooling us, to they’ve emulated the way humans think because the structure of language is the structure of human thought. So even though they don’t think, they can emulate it. We don’t know the answer.

But you’re right, there’s these emergent sets of personalities and approaches. When I talk to A.I. design companies, they often can’t explain why the A.I. stops refusing answering a particular kind of question. When they tune the A.I. to do something better, like answer a math better, it suddenly does other things differently. It’s almost like adjusting the psychology of a system rather than tuning parameters.

So when I said that Claude is allowed to be more personable, part of that is that the system prompt in Claude, which is the initial instructions it gets, allow it to be more personable than, say, Microsoft’s Copilot, formerly Bing, which has explicit instructions after a fairly famous blow up a while ago, that it’s never supposed to talk about itself as a person or indicate feelings. So there’s some instructions, but that’s on top of these roiling systems that act in ways that even the creators don’t expect.

One thing people know about using these models is that hallucinations, just making stuff up, is a problem. Has that changed at all as we’ve moved from GPT-3.5 to 4, as we move from Claude 2 to 3. Like, has that become significantly better? And if not, how do you evaluate the trustworthiness of what you’re being told?

So those are a couple of overlapping questions. The first of them is, it getting better over time? So there is a paper in the field of medical citations that indicated that around 80 to 90 percent of citations had an error, were made up with GPT-3.5. That’s the free version of Chat. And that drops for GPT-4.

So hallucination rates are dropping over time. But the A.I. still makes stuff up because all the A.I. does is hallucinate. There is no mind there. All it’s doing is producing word after word. They are just making stuff up all the time. The fact that they’re right so often is kind of shocking in a lot of ways.

And the way you avoid hallucination is not easily. So one of the things we document in one of our research papers is we purposely designed for a group of Boston Consulting Group consultants — so an elite consulting company — we did a lot of work with them. And one of the experiments we did was we created a task where the A.I. would be confident but wrong. And when we gave people that task to do, and they had access to A.I., they got the task wrong more often than people who didn’t use A.I., because the A.I. misled them, because they fell asleep at the wheel. And all the early research we have on A.I. use suggests that when A.I.s get good enough, we just stop paying attention.

But doesn’t this make them unreliable in a very tricky way? 80 percent — you’re, like, it’s always hallucinating. 20 percent, 5 percent, it’s enough that you can easily be lulled into overconfidence. And one of the reasons it’s really tough here is you’re combining something that knows how to seem extremely persuasive and confident — you feed into the A.I. a 90-page paper on functions and characteristics of right wing populism in Europe, as I did last night.

And within seconds, basically, you get a summary out. And the summary certainly seems confident about what’s going on. But on the other hand, you really don’t know if it’s true. So for a lot of what you might want to use it for, that is unnerving.

Absolutely, and I think hard to grasp, because we’re used to things like type II errors, where we search for something on the internet and don’t find it. We’re not used to type I errors, where we search for something and get an answer back that’s made up. This is a challenge. And there’s a couple things to think about. One of those is — I advocate the BAH standard, best available human. So is the A.I. more or less accurate than the best human you could consult in that area?

And what does that mean for whether or not it’s an appropriate question to ask? And that’s something that we kind of have to judge collectively. It’s valuable to have these studies being done by law professors and medical professionals and people like me and my colleagues in management. They’re trying to understand, how good is the A.I.? And the answer is pretty good, right? So it makes mistakes. “Does it make more or less mistakes than a human” is probably a question we should be asking a lot more.

And the second thing is the kind of tasks that you judge it for. I absolutely agree with you. When summarizing information, it may make errors. Less than an intern you assign to it is an open question, but you have to be aware of that error rate. And that goes back to the 10 hour question. The more you use these A.I.s, the more you start to know when to be suspicious and when not to be. That doesn’t mean you’re eliminating errors.

But just like if you assigned it to an intern, and you’re, like, this person has a sociology degree. They’re going to do a really good job summarizing this, but their biases are going to be focused on the sociological facts and not the political facts. You start to learn these things. So I think, again, that person model helps, because you don’t expect 100 percent reliability out of a person. And that changes the kind of tasks you delegate.

But it also reflects something interesting about the nature of the systems. You have a quote here that I think is very insightful. You wrote, “the core irony of generative A.I.s is that A.I.s were supposed to be all logic and no imagination. Instead, we get A.I.s that make up information, engage in seemingly emotional discussions, and which are intensely creative.” And that last fact is one that makes many people deeply uncomfortable.

There is this collision between what a computer is in our minds and then this strange thing we seem to have invented, which is an entity that emerges out of language, an entity that almost emerges out of art. This is the thing I have the most trouble keeping in my mind, that I need to use the A.I. as an imaginative, creative partner and not as a calculator that uses words.

I love the phrase “a calculator that uses words.” I think we have been let down by science fiction, both in the utopias and apocalypses that A.I. might bring, but also, even more directly, in our view of how machines should work. People are constantly frustrated, and give the same kinds of tests to A.I.s over and over again, like doing math, which it doesn’t do very well — they’re getting better at this.

And on the other hand, saying, well, creativity is a uniquely human spark that we can’t touch, and that A.I., on any creativity test we give it — which, again, are all limited in different ways, blows out humans in almost all measures of creativity that we have. Or all the measures are bad, but that still means something.

But we were using those measures five years ago, even though they were bad. That’s a point you make that I think is interesting and slightly unsettling.

Yeah, we never had to differentiate humans from machines before. It was always easy. So the idea that we had to have a scale that worked for people and machines, who had that? We had the Turing test, which everyone knew was a terrible idea. But since no machine could pass it, it was completely fine. So the question is, how do we measure this? This is an entirely separate set of issues. Like, we don’t even have a definition of sentience or consciousness.

And I think that you’re exactly right on the point, being that we are not ready for this kind of machine, so our intuition is bad.

So one of the things I will sometimes do, and did quite recently, is give the A.I. a series of personal documents, emails I wrote to people I love that were very descriptive of a particular moment in my life. And then I will ask the A.I. about them, or ask the A.I. to analyze me off of them.

And sometimes, it’s a little breathtaking. Almost every moment of true metaphysical shock — to use a term somebody else gave me — I’ve had here has been relational, at how good the A.I. can be — almost like a therapist, right? Sometimes it will see things, the thing I am not saying, in a letter, or in a personal problem. And it will zoom in there, right? It will give, I think, quicker and better feedback in an intuitive way that is not simply mimicking back what I said and is dealing with a very specific situation. It will do better than people I speak to in my life around that.

Conversely, I’m going to read a bit of it later. I tried mightily to make Claude 3 a useful partner in prepping to speak to you, and also in prepping for another podcast recently. And I functionally never have a moment there where I’m all that impressed.

That makes complete sense. I think the weird expectations — we call it the jagged frontier of A.I., that it’s good at some stuff and bad at other stuff. It’s often unexpected. It can lead to these weird moments of disappointment, followed by elation or surprise. And part of the reason why I advocate for people to use it in their jobs is, it isn’t going to outcompete you at whatever you’re best at. I mean, I cannot imagine it’s going to do a better job prepping someone for an interview than you’re doing. And that’s not me just — I’m trying to be nice to you because you’re interviewing me, but because you’re a good interviewer. You’re a famous interviewer. It’s not going to be as good as that. Now, there’s questions about how good these systems get that we don’t know, but we’re kind of at a weirdly comfortable spot in A.I., which is, maybe it’s the 80th percentile of many performances. But I talk to Hollywood writers. It’s not close to writing like a Hollywood writer. It’s not close to being as good an analyst.

It’s not — but it’s better than the average person. And so it’s great as a supplement to weakness, but not to strength. But then, we run back into the problem you talked about, which is, in my weak areas, I have trouble assessing whether the A.I. is accurate or not. So it really becomes sort of a eating its own tail kind of problem.

But this gets to this question of, what are you doing with it? The A.I.s right now seem much stronger as amplifiers and feedback mechanisms and thought partners for you than they do as something you can really outsource your hard work and your thinking to. And that, to me, is one of the differences between trying to spend more time with these systems — like, when you come into them initially, you’re like, OK, here’s a problem, give me an answer.

Whereas when you spend time with them, you realize actually what you’re trying to do with the A.I. is get it to elicit a better answer from you.

And that’s why the book’s called “Co-Intelligence.” For right now, we have a prosthesis for thinking. That’s, like, new in the world. We haven’t had that before — I mean, coffee, but aside from that, not much else. And I think that there’s value in that. I think learning to be partner with this, and where it can get wisdom out of you or not — I was talking to a physics professor at Harvard. And he said, all my best ideas now come from talking to the A.I. And I’m like, well, it doesn’t do physics that well. He’s like, no, but it asks good questions. And I think that there is some value in that kind of interactive piece.

It’s part of why I’m so obsessed with the idea of A.I. in education, because a good educator — and I’ve been working on interactive education skill for a long time — a good educator is eliciting answers from a student. And they’re not telling students things.

So I think that that’s a really nice distinction between co-intelligence, and thought partner, and doing the work for you. It certainly can do some work for you. There’s tedious work that the A.I. does really well. But there’s also this more brilliant piece of making us better people that I think is, at least in the current state of A.I., a really awesome and amazing thing.

We’ve already talked a bit about — Gemini is helpful, and ChatGPT-4 is neutral, and Claude is a bit warmer. But you urge people to go much further than that. You say to give your A.I. a personality. Tell it who to be. So what do you mean by that, and why?

So this is actually almost more of a technical trick, even though it sounds like a social trick. When you think about what A.I.s have done, they’ve trained on the collective corpus of human knowledge. And they know a lot of things. And they’re also probability machines. So when you ask for an answer, you’re going to get the most probable answer, sort of, with some variation in it. And that answer is going to be very neutral. If you’re using GPT-4, it’ll probably talk about a rich tapestry a lot. It loves to talk about rich tapestries. If you ask it to code something artistic, it’ll do a fractal. It does very normal, central A.I. things. So part of your job is to get the A.I. to go to parts of this possibility space where the information is more specific to you, more unique, more interesting, more likely to spark something in you yourself. And you do that by giving it context, so it doesn’t just give you an average answer. It gives you something that’s specialized for you. The easiest way to provide context is a persona. You are blank. You are an expert at interviewing, and you answer in a warm, friendly style. Help me come up with interview questions. It won’t be miraculous in the same way that we were talking about before. If you say you’re Bill Gates, it doesn’t become Bill Gates. But that changes the context of how it answers you. It changes the kinds of probabilities it’s pulling from and results in much more customized and better results.

OK, but this is weirder, I think, than you’re quite letting on here. So something you turned me on to is there’s research showing that the A.I. is going to perform better on various tasks, and differently on them, depending on the personality. So there’s a study that gives a bunch of different personality prompts to one of the systems, and then tries to get it to answer 50 math questions. And the way it got the best performance was to tell the A.I. it was a Starfleet commander who was charting a course through turbulence to the center of an anomaly.

But then, when it wanted to get the best answer on 100 math questions, what worked best was putting it in a thriller, where the clock was ticking down. I mean, what the hell is that about?

“What the hell” is a good question. And we’re just scratching the surface, right? There’s a nice study actually showing that if you emotionally manipulate the A.I., you get better math results. So telling it your job depends on it gets you better results. Tipping, especially $20 or $100 — saying, I’m about to tip you if you do well, seems to work pretty well. It performs slightly worse in December than May, and we think it’s because it has internalized the idea of winter break.

I’m sorry, what?

Well, we don’t know for sure, but —

I’m holding you up here.

People have found the A.I. seems to be more accurate in May, and the going theory is that it has read enough of the internet to think that it might possibly be on vacation in December?

So it produces more work with the same prompts, more output, in May than it does in December. I did a little experiment where I would show it pictures of outside. And I’m like, look at how nice it is outside? Let’s get to work. But yes, the going theory is that it has internalized the idea of winter break and therefore is lazier in December.

I want to just note to people that when ChatGPT came out last year, and we did our first set of episodes on this, the thing I told you was this was going to be a very weird world. What’s frustrating about that is that — I guess I can see the logic of why that might be. Also, it sounds probably completely wrong, but also, I’m certain we will never know. There’s no way to go into the thing and figure that out.

But it would have genuinely never occurred to me before this second that there would be a temporal difference in the amount of work that GPT-4 would do on a question held constant over time. Like, that would have never occurred to me as something that might change at all.

And I think that that is, in some ways, both — as you said, the deep weirdness of these systems. But also, there’s actually downside risks to this. So we know, for example, there is an early paper from Anthropic on sandbagging, that if you ask the A.I. dumber questions, it would get you less accurate answers. And we don’t know the ways in which your grammar or the way you approach the A.I. — we know the amount of spaces you put gets different answers.

So it is very hard, because what it’s basically doing is math on everything you’ve written to figure out what would come next. And the fact that what comes next feels insightful and humane and original doesn’t change that that’s what the math that’s doing is. So part of what I actually advise people to do is just not worry about it so much, because I think then it becomes magic spells that we’re incanting for the A.I. Like, I will pay you $20, you are wonderful at this. It is summer. Blue is your favorite color. Sam Altman loves you. And you go insane.

So acting with it conversationally tends to be the best approach. And personas and contexts help, but as soon as you start evoking spells, I think we kind of cross over the line into, “who knows what’s happening here?”

Well, I’m interested in the personas, although I just — I really find this part of the conversation interesting and strange. But I’m interested in the personalities you can give the A.I. for a different reason. I prompted you around this research on how a personality changes the accuracy rate of an A.I. But a lot of the reason to give it a personality, to answer you like it is Starfleet Commander, is because you have to listen to the A.I. You are in relationship with it.

And different personas will be more or less hearable by you, interesting to you. So you have a piece on your newsletter which is about how you used the A.I. to critique your book. And one of the things you say in there, and give some examples of, is you had to do so in the voice of Ozymandias because you just found that to be more fun. And you could hear that a little bit more easily.

So could you talk about that dimension of it, too, making the A.I. not just prompting you to be more accurate, but giving it a personality to be more interesting to you?

The great power of A.I. is as a kind of companion. It wants to make you happy. It wants to have a conversation. And that can be overt or covert.

So, to me, actively shaping what I want the A.I. to act like, telling it to be friendly or telling it to be pompous, is entertaining, right? But also, it does change the way I interact with it. When it has a pompous voice, I don’t take the criticism as seriously. So I can think about that kind of approach. I could get pure praise out of it, too, if I wanted to do it that way.

But the other factor that’s also super weird, while we’re on the way of super weird A.I. things, is that if you don’t do that, it’s going to still figure something out about you. It is a cold reader. And I think a lot about the very famous piece by Kevin Roose, the New York Times technology reporter, about Bing about a year ago, when Bing, which was GPT-4 powered, came out and had this personality of Sydney.

And Kevin has this very long description that got published in The New York Times about how Sydney basically threatened him, and suggested he leaves his wife, and very dramatic, kind of very unsettling interaction. And I was working with — I didn’t have anything quite that intense, but I got into arguments with Sydney around the same time, where it would — when I asked her to do work for me, it said you should do the work yourself. Otherwise, it’s dishonest. And it kept accusing me of plagiarism, which felt really unusual.

But the reason why Kevin ended up in that situation is the A.I. knows all kinds of human interactions and wants to slot into a story with you.

So a great story is jealous lover who’s gone a little bit insane, and the man who won’t leave his wife, or student and teacher, or two debaters arguing with each other, or grand enemies. And the A.I. wants to do that with you. So if you’re not explicit, it’s going to try and find a dialogue.

And I’ve noticed, for example, that if I talk to the A.I. and I imply that we’re having a debate, it will never agree with me. If I imply that I’m a teacher and it’s a student, even as much as saying I’m a professor, it is much more pliable.

So part of why I like assigning a personality is to have an explicit personality you’re operating with, so it’s not trying to cold read and guess what personality you’re looking for.

Kevin and I have talked a lot about that conversation with Sydney. And one of the things I always found fascinating about it is, to me, it revealed an incredibly subtle level of read by Sydney Bing, which is, what was really happening there? When you say the A.I. wants to make you happy, it has to read on some level what it is you’re really looking for, over time.

And what was Kevin? What is Kevin? Kevin is a journalist. And Kevin was nudging and pushing that system to try to do something that would be a great story. And it did that. It understood, on some level — again, the anthropomorphizing language there. But it realized that Kevin wanted some kind of intense interaction. And it gave him, like, the greatest A.I. story anybody has ever been given. I mean, an A.I. story that we are still talking about a year later, an A.I. story that changed the way A.I.s were built, at least for a while.

And people often talked about what Sydney was revealing about itself. But to me, what was always so unbelievably impressive about that was its ability to read the person, and its ability to make itself into the thing, the personality, the person was trying to call forth.

And now, I think we’re more practiced at doing this much more directly. But I think a lot of people have their moment of sleeplessness here. That was my Rubicon on this. I didn’t know something after that I didn’t know before it in terms of capabilities.

But when I read that, I thought that the level of — interpersonal isn’t the right word, but the level of subtlety it was able to display in terms of giving a person what it wanted, without doing so explicitly — right, without saying, “we’re playing this game now,” was really quite remarkable.

It’s a mirror. I mean, it’s trained on our stuff. And one of the revealing things about that, that I think we should be paying a lot more attention to, is the fact that because it’s so good at this, right now, none of the frontier A.I. models with the possible exception of Inflection’s Pi, which has been basically acquired in large part by Microsoft now, were built to optimize around keeping us in a relationship with the A.I. They just accidentally do that. There are other A.I. models that aren’t as good that have been focused on this, but that has been something explicit from the frontier models they’ve been avoiding till now. Claude sort of breaches that line a little bit, which is part of why I think it’s engaging. But I worry about the same kind of mechanism that inevitably reined in social media, which is, you can make a system more addictive and interesting. And because it’s such a good cold reader, you could tune A.I. to make you want to talk to it more.

It’s very hands off and sort of standoffish right now. But if you use the voice system in ChatGPT-4 on your phone, where you’re having a conversation, there’s moments where you’re like, oh, you feel like you’re talking to a person. You have to remind yourself. So to me, that persona aspect is both its great strength, but also one of the things I’m most worried about that isn’t a sort of future science fiction scenario.

I want to hold here for a minute, because we’ve been talking about how to use frontier models, I think implicitly talking about how to use A.I. for work. But the way that a lot of people are using it is using these other companies that are explicitly building for relationships. So I’ve had people at one of the big companies tell me that if we wanted to tune our system relationally, if we wanted to tune it to be your friend, your lover, your partner, your therapist, like, we could blow the doors off that. And we’re just not sure it’s ethical.

But there are a bunch of people who have tens of millions of users, Replika, Character.AI, which are doing this. And I tried to use Replika about six, eight months ago. And honestly, I found it very boring. They had recently lobotomized it because people were getting too erotic with their Replikants. But I just couldn’t get into it. I’m probably too old to have A.I. friends, in the way that my parents were probably too old to get really in to talking to people on AOL Instant Messenger.

But I have a five-year-old, and I have a two-year-old. And by the time my five-year-old is 10 and my two-year-old is 7, they’re not necessarily going to have the weirdness I’m going to have about having A.I. friends. And I don’t think we even have any way to think about this.

I think that is an absolute near-term certainty, and sort of an unstoppable one, that we are going to have A.I. relationships in a broader sense. And I think the question is, just like we’ve just been learning — I mean, we’re doing a lot of social experiments at scale we’ve never done before in the last couple of decades, right? Turns out social media brings out entirely different things in humans that we weren’t expecting. And we’re still writing papers about echo chambers and tribalism and facts, and what we agree or disagree with. We’re about to have another wave of this. And we have very little research. And you could make a plausible story up, that what’ll happen is it’ll help mental health in a lot of ways for people, and then there’ll be more social outside, that there might be a rejection of this kind of thing.

I don’t know what’ll happen. But I do think that we can expect with absolute certainty that you will have A.I.s that are more interesting to talk to, and fool you into thinking, even if you know better, that they care about you in a way that is incredibly appealing. And that will happen very soon. And I don’t know how we’re going to adjust to it. But it seems inevitable, as you said.

I was worried we were getting off track in the conversation, but I realized we were actually getting deeper on the track I was trying to take us down.

We were talking about giving the A.I. personality, right — telling Claude 3, hey, I need you to act as a sardonic podcast editor, and then Claude 3’s whole persona changes. But when you talk about building your A.I. on Kindroid, on Character, on Replika — so I just created a Kindroid one the other day. And Kindroid is kind of interesting, because its basic selling point is we’ve taken the guardrails largely off. We are trying to make something that is not lobotomized, that is not perfectly safe for work. And so the personality can be quite unrestrained. So I was interested in what that would be like.

But the key thing you have to do at the beginning of that is tell the system what its personality is. So you can pick from a couple that are preset, but I wrote a long one myself — you know, you live in California. You’re a therapist. You like all these different things. You have a highly intellectual style of communicating. You’re extremely warm, but you like ironic humor. You don’t like small talk. You don’t like to say things that are boring or generic. You don’t use a lot of emoticons and emojis. And so now it talks to me the way people I talk to talk.

And the thing I want to bring this back to is that one of the things that requires you to know is what kind of personalities work with you, for you to know yourself and your preferences a little bit more deeply.

I think that’s a temporary state of affairs, like extremely temporary. I think a GPT-4 class model — we actually already know this. They can guess your intent quite well. And I think that this is a way of giving you a sense of agency or control in the short term. I don’t think you’re going to need to know yourself at all. And I think you wouldn’t right now if any of the GPT-4 class models allowed themselves to be used in this way, without guardrails, which they don’t, I think you would already find it’s just going to have a conversation with you and morph into what you want.

I think that for better or worse, the “insight” in these systems is good enough that way. It’s sort of why I also don’t worry so much about prompt crafting in the long term, to go back to the other issue we were talking about, because I think that they will work on intent. And there’s a lot of evidence that they’re good at guessing intent. So I like this period, because I think it does value self reflection. And our interaction with the A.I. is somewhat intentional because we can watch this interaction take place.

But I think there’s a reason why some of the worry you hear out of the labs is about superhuman levels of manipulation. There’s a reason why the whistleblower from Google was all about that — sort of fell for the chat bot, and that’s why they felt it was alive. Like, I think we’re deeply trickable in this way. And A.I. is really good at figuring out what we want without us being explicit.

So that’s a little bit chilling, but I’m nevertheless going to stay in this world we’re in, because I think we’re going to be in it for at least a little while longer, where you do have to do all this prompt engineering. What is a prompt, first? And what is prompt engineering?

So a prompt is — technically, it is the sentence, the command you’re putting into the A.I. What it really is is the beginning part of the A.I.s text that it’s processing. And then it’s just going to keep adding more words or tokens to the end of that reply, until it’s done. So a prompt is the command you’re giving the A.I. But in reality, it’s sort of a seed from which the A.I. builds.

And when you prompt engineer, what are some ways to do that? Maybe one to begin with, because it seems to work really well, is chain of thought.

Just to take a step back, A.I. prompting remains super weird. Again, strange to have a system where the companies making the systems are writing papers as they’re discovering how to use the systems, because nobody knows how to make them work better yet. And we found massive differences in our experiments on prompt types. So for example, we were able to get the A.I. to generate much more diverse ideas by using this chain of thought approach, which we’ll talk about.

But also, it turned out to generate a lot better ideas if you told it it was Steve Jobs than if you told it it was Madame Curie. And we don’t know why. So there’s all kinds of subtleties here. But the idea, basically, of chain of thought, that seems to work well in almost all cases, is that you’re going to have the A.I. work step by step through a problem. First, outline the problem, you know, the essay you’re going to write. Second, give me the first line of each paragraph. Third, go back and write the entire thing. Fourth, check it and make improvements.

And what that does is — because the A.I. has no internal monologue, it’s not thinking. When the A.I. isn’t writing something, there’s no thought process. All it can do is produce the next token, the next word or set of words. And it just keeps doing that step by step. Because there’s no internal monologue, this in some ways forces a monologue out in the paper. So it lets the A.I. think by writing before it produces the final result. And that’s one of the reasons why chain of thought works really well.

So just step-by-step instructions is a good first effort.

Then you get an answer, and then what?

And then — what you do in a conversational approach is you go back and forth. If you want work output, what you’re going to do is treat it like it is an intern who just turned in some work to you. Actually, could you punch up paragraph two a little bit? I don’t like the example in paragraph one. Could you make it a little more creative, give me a couple of variations? That’s a conversational approach trying to get work done.

If you’re trying to play, you just run from there and see what happens. You can always go back, especially with a model like GPT-4, to an earlier answer, and just pick up from there if your heads off in the wrong direction.

So I want to offer an example of how this back and forth can work. So we asked Claude 3 about prompt engineering, about what we’re talking about here. And the way it described it to us is, quote, “It’s a shift from the traditional paradigm of human-computer interaction, where we input explicit commands and the machine executes them in a straightforward way, to a more open ended, collaborative dialogue, where the human and the A.I. are jointly shaping the creative process,” end quote. And that’s pretty good, I think. That’s interesting. It’s worth talking about. I like that idea that it’s a more collaborative dialogue. But that’s also boring, right? Even as I was reading it, it’s a mouthful. It’s wordy. So I kind of went back and forth with it a few times. And I was saying, listen, you’re a podcast editor. You’re concise, but also then I gave it a couple examples of how I punched up questions in the document, right? This is where the question began. Here’s where it ended. And then I said, try again, and try again, and try again, and make it shorter. And make it more concise.

And I got this: quote, “OK, so I was talking to this A.I., Claude, about prompt engineering, you know, this whole art of crafting prompts to get the best out of these A.I. models. And it said something that really struck me. It called prompt engineering a new meta skill that we’re all picking up as we play with A.I., kind of like learning a new language to collaborate with it instead of just bossing it around. What do you think, is prompt engineering the new must have skill?” End Claude.

And that second one, I have to say, is pretty damn good. That really nailed the way I speak in questions. And it gets it at this way where if you’re willing to go back and forth, it does learn how to echo you.

So I am at a loss about when you went to Claude and when it was you, to be honest. So I was ready to answer at like two points along the way, so that was pretty good from my perspective, sitting here, talking to you. That felt interesting, and felt like the conversation we’ve been having. And I think there’s a couple of interesting lessons there.

The first, by the way, of — interestingly, you asked A.I. about one of its weakest points, which is about A.I. And everybody does this, but because its knowledge window doesn’t include that much stuff about A.I., it actually is pretty weak in terms of knowing how to do good prompting, or what a prompt is, or what A.I.s do well. But you did a good job with that. And I love that you went back and forth and shaped it. One of the techniques you used to shape it, by the way, was called few-shot, which is giving an example. So the two most powerful techniques are chain of thought, which we just talked about, and few-shot, giving it examples. Those are both well supported in the literature. And then, I’d add personas. So we’ve talked about, I think, the basics of prompt crafting here overall. And I think that the question was pretty good.

But you keep wanting to not talk about the future. And I totally get that. But I think when we’re talking about learning something, where there is a lag, where we talk about policy — should prompt crafting be taught in schools? I think it matters to think six months ahead. And again, I don’t think a single person in the A.I. labs I’ve ever talked to thinks prompt crafting for most people is going to be a vital skill, because the A.I. will pick up on the intent of what you want much better.

One of the things I realized trying to spend more time with the A.I. is that you really have to commit to this process. You have to go back and forth with it a lot. If you do, you can get really good questions, like the one I just did — or, I think, really good outcomes. But it does take time.

And I guess in a weird way it’s like the same problem of any relationship, that it’s actually hard to state your needs clearly and consistently and repeatedly, sometimes because you have not even articulated them in words yourself. At least the A.I., I guess, doesn’t get mad at you for it.

But I’m curious if you have advice, either at a practical level or principles level, about how to communicate to these systems what you want from them.

One set of techniques that work quite well is to speed run to where you are in the conversation. So you can actually pick up an older conversation where you got the A.I.‘s mindset where you want and work from there. You can even copy and paste that into a new window. You can ask the A.I. to summarize where you got in that previous conversation, and the tone the A.I. was taking, and then when you give a new instruction say the interaction I like to have with you is this, so have it solve the problem for you by having it summarize the tone that you happen to like at the end.

So there are a bunch of ways of building on your work as you start to go forward, so you’re not starting from scratch every time. And I think you’ll start to get shorthands that get you to that right kind of space. For me, there are chats that I pick up on. And actually, I assign these to my students too. I have some ongoing conversations that they’re supposed to have with the A.I., but then there’s a lot of interactions they’re supposed to have that are one off.

So you start to divide the work into, this is a work task. And we’re going to handle this in a single chat conversation. And then I’m going to go back to this long standing discussion when I want to pick it up, and it’ll have a completely different tone. So I think in some ways, you don’t necessarily want convergence among all your A.I. threads. You kind of want them to be different from each other.

You did mention something important there, because they’re already getting much bigger in terms of how much information they can hold. Like, the earlier generations could barely hold a significant chat. Now, Claude 3 can functionally hold a book in its memory. And it’s only going to go way, way, way up from here. And I know I’ve been trying to keep us in the present, but this feels to me really quickly like where this is both going and how it’s going to get a lot better.

I mean, you imagine Apple building Siri 2030, and Siri 2030 scanning your photos and your Journal app — Apple now has a Journal app. You have to assume they’re thinking about the information they can get from that, if you allow it — your messages, anything you’re willing to give it access to. It then knows all of this information about you, keeps all of that in its mind as it talks to you and acts on your behalf. I mean, that really seems to me to be where we’re going, an A.I. that you don’t have to keep telling it who to be because it knows you intimately and is able to hold all that knowledge all at the same time constantly.

It’s not even going there. Like, it’s already there. Gemini 1.5 can hold an entire movie, books. But like, it starts to now open up entirely new ways of working. I can show it a video of me working on my computer, just screen capture. And it knows all the tasks I’m doing and suggests ways to help me out. It starts watching over my shoulder and helping me. I put in all of my work that I did prior to getting tenure and said, write my tenure statement. Use exact quotes.

And it was much better than any of the previous models because it wove together stuff, and because everything was its memory. It doesn’t hallucinate as much. All the quotes were real quotes, and not made up. And already, by the way, GPT-4 has been rolling out a model of ChatGPT that has a private note file the A.I. takes — you can access it — but it takes notes on you as it goes along, about things you liked or didn’t like, and reads those again at the beginning of any chat. So this is present, right? It’s not even in the future.

And Google also connects to your Gmail, so it’ll read through your Gmail. I mean, I think this idea of a system that knows you intimately, where you’re picking up a conversation as you go along, is not a 2030 thing. It is a 2024 thing if you let the systems do it.

One thing that feels important to keep in front of mind here is that we do have some control over that. And not only do we have some control over it, but business models and policy are important here. And one thing we know from inside these A.I. shops is these A.I.s already are, but certainly will be, really super persuasive.

And so if the later iterations of the A.I. companions are tuned on the margin to try to encourage you to be also out in the real world, that’s going to matter, versus whether they have a business model that all they want is for you to spend a maximum amount of time talking to your A.I. companion, whether you ever have a friend who is flesh and blood be damned. And so that’s an actual choice, right? That’s going to be a programming decision. And I worry about what happens if we leave that all up to the companies, right? At some point, there’s a lot of venture capital money in here right now. At some point, the venture capital runs out. At some point, people need to make big profits. At some point, they’re in competition with other players who need to make profits. And that’s when things — you get into what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshitification” cycle, where things that were once adding a lot of value to the user begin extracting a lot of value to the user.

These systems, because of how they can be tuned, can lead to a lot of different outcomes. But I think we’re going to have to be much more comfortable than we’ve been in the past deciding what we think is a socially valuable use and what we think is a socially destructive use.

I absolutely agree. I think that we have agency here. We have agency in how we operate this in businesses, and whether we use this in ways that encourage human flourishing and employees, or are brutal to them. And we have agency over how this works socially. And I think we abrogated that responsibility with social media, and that is an example. Not to be bad news, because I generally have a lot of mixed optimism and pessimism about parts of A.I., but the bad news piece is there are open source models out there that are quite good.

The internet is pretty open. We would have to make some pretty strong choices to kill A.I. chat bots as an option. We certainly can restrict the large American companies from doing that, but a Llama 2 or Llama 3 is going to be publicly available and very good. There’s a lot of open source models. So the question also is how effective any regulation will be, which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t regulate it.

But there’s also going to need to be some social decisions being made about how to use these things well as a society that are going to have to go beyond just the legal piece, or companies voluntarily complying.

I see a lot of reasons to be worried about the open source models. And people talk about things like bioweapons and all that. But for some of the harms I’m talking about here, if you want to make money off of American kids, we can regulate you. So sometimes I feel like we almost, like, give up the fight before it begins. But in terms of what a lot of people are going to use, if you want to be having credit card payments processed by a major processor, then you have to follow the rules.

I mean, individual people or small groups can do a lot of weird things with an open source model, so that doesn’t negate every harm. But if you’re making a lot of money, then you have relationships we can regulate.

I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t think there’s any reason to give up hope on regulation. I think that we can mitigate. And I think part of our job, though, is also not just to mitigate the harms, but to guide towards the positive viewpoints, right? So what I worry about is that the incentive for profit making will push for A.I. that acts informally as your therapist or your friend, while our worries about experimentation, which are completely valid, are slowing down our ability to do experiments to find out ways to do this right. And I think it’s really important to have positive examples, too. I want to point to the A.I. systems acting ethically as your friend or companion, and figure out what that is, so there’s a positive model to look for. So I’m not just — this is not to denigrate the role of regulation, which I think is actually going to be important here, and self regulation, and rapid response from government, but also the companion problem of, “we need to make some sort of decisions about what are the paragons of this, what is acceptable as a society?”

So I want to talk a bit about another downside here, and this one more in the mainstream of our conversation, which is on the human mind, on creativity. So a lot of the work A.I. is good at automating is work that is genuinely annoying, time consuming, laborious, but often plays an important role in the creative process. So I can tell you that writing a first draft is hard, and that work on the draft is where the hard thinking happens.

And it’s hard because of that thinking. And the more we outsource drafting to A.I., which I think it is fair to say is a way a lot of people intuitively use it — definitely, a lot of students want to use it that way — the fewer of those insights we’re going to have on those drafts. Look, I love editors. I am an editor in one respect. But I can tell you, you make more creative breakthroughs as a writer than an editor. The space for creative breakthrough is much more narrow once you get to editing.

And I do worry that A.I. is going to make us all much more like editors than like writers.

I think the idea of struggle is actually a core one in many things. I’m an educator. And one thing that keeps coming out in the research is that there is a strong disconnect between what students think they’re learning and when they learn. So there was a great controlled experiment at Harvard in intro science classes, where students either went to a pretty entertaining set of lectures, or else they were forced to do active learning, where they actually did the work in class.

The active learning group reported being unhappier and not learning as much, but did much better on tests, because when you’re confronted with what you don’t know, and you have to struggle, when you feel, like, bad, you actually make much more progress than if someone spoon feeds you an entertaining answer. And I think this is a legitimate worry that I have. And I think that there’s going to have to be some disciplined approach to writing as well, like, I don’t use the A.I.

Not just because, by the way, it makes the work easier, but also because you mentally anchor on the A.I.‘s answer. And in some ways, the most dangerous A.I. application, in my mind, is the fact that you have these easy co-pilots in Word and Google Docs, because any writer knows about the tyranny of the blank page, about staring at a blank page and not knowing what to do next, and the struggle of filling that up. And when you have a button that produces really good words for you, on demand, you’re just going to do that. And it’s going to anchor your writing. We can teach people about the value of productive struggle, but I think that during the school years, we have to teach people the value of writing — not just assign an essay and assume that the essay does something magical, but be very intentional about the writing process and how we teach people about how to do that, because I do think the temptation of what I call “the button” is going to be there otherwise, for everybody.

But I worry this stretches, I mean, way beyond writing. So the other place I worry about this, or one of the other places I worry about this a lot, is summarizing. And I mean, this goes way back. When I was in school, you could buy Sparknotes. And they were these little, like, pamphlet sized descriptions of what’s going on in “War and Peace” or what’s going on in “East of Eden.”

And reading the Sparknotes often would be enough to fake your way through the test, but it would not have any chance, like, not a chance, of changing you, of shifting you, of giving you the ideas and insights that reading “Crime and Punishment” or “East of Eden” would do.

And one thing I see a lot of people doing is using A.I. for summary. And one of the ways it’s clearly going to get used in organizations is for summary — summarize my email, and so on.

And here too, one of the things that I think may be a real vulnerability we have, as we move into this era — my view is that the way we think about learning and insights is usually wrong. I mean, you were saying a second ago we can teach a better way. But I think we’re doing a crap job of it now, because I think people believe that — it’s sort of what I call the matrix theory of the human mind, if you could just jack the information into the back of your head and download it, you’re there.

But what matters about reading a book, and I see this all the time preparing for this show, is the time you spend in the book, where over time, like, new insights and associations for you begin to shake loose. And so I worry it’s coming into an efficiency-obsessed educational and intellectual culture, where people have been imagining forever, what if we could do all this without having to spend any of the time on it? But actually, there’s something important in the time.

There’s something important in the time with a blank page, with the hard book. And I don’t think we lionize intellectual struggle. In some ways, I think we lionize the people for whom it does not seem like a struggle, the people who seem to just glide through and be able to absorb the thing instantly, the prodigies. And I don’t know. When I think about my kids, when I think about the kind of attention and creativity I want them to have, this is one of the things that scares me most, because kids don’t like doing hard things a lot of the time.

And it’s going to be very hard to keep people from using these systems in this way.

So I don’t mean to push back too much on this.

No, please, push back a lot.

But I think you’re right.

Imagine we’re debating and you are a snarky. A.I. [LAUGHS]

Fair enough. With that prompt —

With that prompt engineering.

— yeah, I mean, I think that this is the eternal thing about looking back on the next generation, we worry about technology ruining them. I think this makes ruining easier. But as somebody who teaches at universities, like, lots of people are summarizing. Like, I think those of us who enjoy intellectual struggle are always thinking everybody else is going through the same intellectual struggle when they do work. And they’re doing it about their own thing. They may or may not care the same way.

So this makes it easier, but before A.I., there were — best estimates from the U.K. that I could find, 20,000 people in Kenya whose full time job was writing essays for students in the U.S. and U.K. People have been cheating and Sparknoting and everything for a long time. And I think that what people will have to learn is that this tool is a valuable co-intelligence, but is not a replacement for your own struggle.

And the people who found shortcuts will keep finding shortcuts. Temptation may loom larger, but I can’t imagine that — my son is in high school, doesn’t like to use A.I. for anything. And he just doesn’t find it valuable for the way he’s thinking about stuff. I think we will come to that kind of accommodation. I’m actually more worried about what happens inside organizations than I am worried about human thought, because I don’t think we’re going to atrophy as much as we think. I think there’s a view that every technology will destroy our ability to think.

And I think we just choose how to use it or not. Like, even if it’s great at insights, people who like thinking like thinking.

Well, let me take this from another angle. One of the things that I’m a little obsessed with is the way the internet did not increase either domestic or global productivity for any real length of time. So I mean, it’s a very famous line. You can see the IT revolution anywhere but in the productivity statistics. And then you do get, in the ‘90s, a bump in productivity that then peters out in the 2000s.

And if I had told you what the internet would be, like, I mean everybody, everywhere would be connected to each other. You could collaborate with anybody, anywhere, instantly. You could teleconference. You would have access to, functionally, the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket at all times. I mean, all of these things that would have been genuine sci-fi, you would have thought would have been — led to a kind of intellectual utopia. And it kind of doesn’t do that much, if you look at the statistics.

You don’t see a huge step change. And my view — and I’d be curious for your thoughts on this, because I know this is the area you study in — my view is it everything we said was good happened. I mean, as a journalist, Google and things like that make me so much more productive. It’s not that it didn’t give us the gift. It’s that it also had a cost — distraction, checking your email endlessly, being overwhelmed with the amount of stuff coming into you, the sort of endless communication task list, the amount of internal communications and organizations, now with Slack and everything else.

And so some of the time that was given to us back was also taken back. And I see a lot of dynamics like this that could play out with A.I. — I wouldn’t even just say if we’re not careful, I just think they will play out and already are. I mean, the internet is already filling with mediocre crap generated by A.I. There is going to be a lot of destructive potential, right? You are going to have your sex bot in your pocket, right? There’s a million things — and not just that, but inside organizations, there’s going to be people padding out what would have been something small, trying to make it look more impressive by using the A.I. to make something bigger. And then, you’re going to use the A.I. to summarize it back down. The A.I. researcher, Jonathan Frankel, described this to me as, like, the boring apocalypse version of A.I., where you’re just endlessly inflating and then summarizing, and then inflating and then summarizing the volume of content between different A.I.

My ChatGPT is making my presentation bigger and more impressive, and your ChatGPT is trying to summarize it down to bullet points for you. And I’m not saying this has to happen. But I am saying that it would require a level of organizational and cultural vigilance to stop, that nothing in the internet era suggests to me that we have.

So I think there’s a lot there to chew on. And I also have spent a lot of time trying to think about why the internet didn’t work as well. I was an early Wikipedia administrator.

Thank you for your service.

[LAUGHS] Yeah, it was very scarring. But I think a lot about this. And I think A.I. is different. I don’t know if it’s different in a positive way. And I think we talked about some of the negative ways it might be different. And I think it’s going to be many things at once, happening quite quickly. So I think the information environment’s going to be filled up with crap. We will not be able to tell the difference between true and false anymore. It will be an accelerant on all the kinds of problems that we have there.

On the other hand, it is an interactive technology that adapts to you. From an education perspective, I have lived through the entire internet will change education piece. I have MOOCs, massive online courses, with — quarter million people have taken them. And in the end, you’re just watching a bunch of videos. Like, that doesn’t change education.

But I can have an A.I. tutor that actually can teach you — and we’re seeing it happen — and adapt to you at your level of education, and your knowledge base, and explain things to you. But not just explain, elicit answers from you, interactively, in a way that actually learns things.

The thing that makes A.I. possibly great is that it’s so very human, so it interacts with our human systems in a way that the internet did not. We built human systems on top of it, but A.I. is very human. It deals with human forms and human issues and our human bureaucracy very well. And that gives me some hope that even though there’s going to be lots of downsides, that the upsides of productivity and things like that are real. Part of the problem with the internet is we had to digitize everything. We had to build systems that would make our offline world work with our online world. And we’re still doing that. If you go to business schools, digitizing is still a big deal 30 years on from early internet access. A.I. makes this happen much quicker because it works with us. So I’m a little more hopeful than you are about that, but I also think that the downside risks are truly real and hard to anticipate.

Somebody was just pointing out that Facebook is now 100 percent filled with algorithmically generated images that look like their actual grandparents, making things who are saying, like, what do you think of my work? Because that’s a great way to get engagement. And the other grandparents in there have no idea it’s A.I. generated.

Things are about to get very, very weird in all the ways that we talked about, but that doesn’t mean the positives can’t be there as well.

I think that is a good place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

OK, so the books I’ve been thinking about are not all fun, but I think they’re all interesting. One of them is “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” which is — it’s two things. It’s an argument about why we will never have the kind of growth that we did in the first part of the Industrial Revolution again, but I think that’s less interesting than the first half of the book, which is literally how the world changed between 1870 or 1890 and 1940, versus 1940 and 1990, or 2000.

And the transformation of the world that happened there — in 1890, no one had plumbing in the U.S.. And the average woman was carrying tons of water every day. And you had no news, and everything was local, and everyone’s bored all the time — to 1940, where the world looks a lot like today’s world, was fascinating. And I think it gives you a sense of what it’s like to be inside a technological singularity, and I think worth reading for that reason — or at least the first half.

The second book I’d recommend is “The Knowledge,” by Dartnell, which is a really interesting book. It is ostensibly almost a survival guide, but it is how to rebuild industrial civilization from the ground up, if we were to collapse. And I don’t recommend it as a survivalist. I recommend it because it is fascinating to see how complex our world is, and how many interrelated pieces we’ve managed to build up as a society. And in some ways, it gives me a lot of hope to think about how all of these interconnections work.

And then the third one is science fiction, and I was debating — I read a lot of science fiction, and there’s a lot of interesting A.I.s in science fiction. Everyone talks about — who’s in the science fiction world — Iain Banks, who wrote about the Culture, which is really interesting, about what it’s like to live beside super intelligent A.I. Vernor Vinge just died yesterday, when we were recording this, and wrote these amazing books about — he coined the term singularity.

But I want to recommend a much more depressing book that’s available for free, which is Peter Watts’s “Blindsight.” And it is not a fun book, but it is a fascinating thriller set on an interstellar mission to visit an alien race. And it’s essentially a book about sentience, and it’s a book about the difference between consciousness and sentience, and about intelligence and the different ways of perceiving the world in a setting where that is the sort of centerpiece of the thriller. And I think in a world where we have machines that might be intelligent without being sentient, it is a relevant, if kind of chilling, read.

Ethan Mollick, your book is called “Co-Intelligence.” Your Substack is One Useful Thing. Thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

ETHAN MOLLICK: Thanks for having me.

EZRA KLEIN: So let’s assume I’m interested in A.I. And I tried ChatGPT a bunch of times, and I was suitably impressed and weirded out for a minute. And so I know the technology is powerful. I’ve heard all these predictions about how it will take everything over, or become part of everything we do. But I don’t actually see how it fits into my life, really, at all. What am I missing?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So you’re not alone. This is actually very common. And I think part of the reason is that the way ChatGPT works isn’t really set up for you to understand how powerful it is. You really do need to use the paid version, they are significantly smarter. And you can almost think of this — like, GPT-3, which was — nobody really paid attention to when it came out, before ChatGPT, was about as good as a sixth grader at writing. GPT-3.5, the free version of ChatGPT, is about as good as a high school, or maybe even a college freshman or sophomore.

EZRA KLEIN: When you say, bring it to every table you’re at, one, that sounds like a big pain, because now I’ve got to add another step of talking to the computer constantly. But two, it’s just not obvious to me what that would look like. So what does it look like? What does it look like for you, or what does it look like for others — that you feel is applicable widely?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So I just finished this book. It’s my third book. I keep writing books, even though I keep forgetting that writing books is really hard. But this was, I think, my best book, but also the most interesting to write. And it was thanks to A.I. And there’s almost no A.I. writing in the book, but I used it continuously. So things that would get in the way of writing — I think I’m a much better writer than A.I. — hopefully, people agree. But there’s a lot of things that get in your way as a writer.

So I would get stuck on a sentence. I couldn’t do a transition. Give me 30 versions of this sentence in radically different styles. There’s 200 different citations. I had the A.I. read through the papers that I read through, write notes on them, and organize them for me. I had the A.I. suggest analogies that might be useful. I had the A.I. act as readers, and in different personas, read through the paper from the perspective of, is there some example I could give that’s better? Is this understandable or not?

And that’s very typical of the kind of way that I would, say, bring it to the table. Use it for everything, and you’ll find its limits and abilities.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you one specific question on that, because I’ve been writing a book. And on some bad days of writing the book, I decided to play around with GPT-4. And of the things that it got me thinking about was the kind of mistake or problem these systems can help you see and the kind they can’t. So they can do a lot of, give me 15 versions of this paragraph, 30 versions of this sentence. And every once in a while, you get a good version or you’ll shake something a little bit loose.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think that’s a wise point. I think there’s two or three things bundled there. The first of those is A.I. is good, but it’s not as good as you. It is, say, at the 80th percentile of writers based on some results, maybe a little bit higher. In some ways, if it was able to have that burst of insight and to tell you this chapter is wrong, and I’ve thought of a new way of phrasing it, we would be at that sort of mythical AGI level of A.I. as smart as the best human. And it just isn’t yet.

EZRA KLEIN: For most people — right, if you’re just going to pick one model, what would you pick? What do you recommend to people? And second, how do you recommend they access it? Because something going on in the A.I. world is there are a lot of wrappers on these models. So ChatGPT has an app. Claude does not have an app. Obviously, Google has its suite of products. And there are organizations that have created a different spin on somebody else’s A.I. — so Perplexity, which is, I believe, built on GPT-4 now, you can pay for it.

ETHAN MOLLICK: It’s a really good question. I recommend working with one of the models as directly as possible, through the company that creates them. And there’s a few reasons for that. One is you get as close to the unadulterated personality as possible. And second, that’s where features tend to roll out first. So if you like sort of intellectual challenge, I think Claude 3 is the most intellectual of the models, as you said.

EZRA KLEIN: So you say it takes about 10 hours to learn a model. Ten hours is a long time, actually. What are you doing in that 10 hours? What are you figuring out? How did you come to that number? Give me some texture on your 10 hour rule.

ETHAN MOLLICK: So first off, I want to indicate the 10 hours is as arbitrary as 10,000 steps. Like, there’s no scientific basis for it. This is an observation. But it also does move you past the, I poked at this for an evening, and it moves you towards using this in a serious way. I don’t know if 10 hours is the real limit, but it seems to be somewhat transformative. The key is to use it in an area where you have expertise, so you can understand what it’s good or bad at, learn the shape of its capabilities.

EZRA KLEIN: Something that feels to me like a theme of your work is that the way to approach this is not learning a tool. It is building a relationship. Is that fair?

ETHAN MOLLICK: A.I. is built like a tool. It’s software. It’s very clear at this point that it’s an emulation of thought. But because of how it’s built, because of how it’s constructed, it is much more like working with a person than working with a tool. And when we talk about it this way, I almost feel kind of bad, because there’s dangers in building a relationship with a system that is purely artificial, and doesn’t think and have emotions. But honestly, that is the way to go forward. And that is sort of a great sin, anthropomorphization, in the A.I. literature, because it can blind you to the fact that this is software with its own sets of foibles and approaches.

And A.I.s do all of these things. And I find that teachers, managers, even parents, editors, are often better at using these systems, because they’re used to treating this as a person. And they interact with it like a person would, giving feedback. And that helps you. And I think the second piece of that “not tool” piece is that when I talk to OpenAI or Anthropic, they don’t have a hidden instruction manual. There is no list of how you should use this as a writer, or as a marketer, or as an educator.

They don’t even know what the capabilities of these systems are. They’re all sort of being discovered together. And that is also not like a tool. It’s more like a person with capabilities that we don’t fully know yet.

EZRA KLEIN: So you’ve done this with all the big models. You’ve done, I think, much more than this, actually, with all the big models. And one thing you describe feeling is that they don’t just have slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but they have different — for lack of a better term, and to anthropomorphize — personalities, and that the 10 hours in part is about developing an intuition not just for how they work, but kind of how they are and how they talk, the sort of entity you’re dealing with.

ETHAN MOLLICK: It’s important to know the personalities not just as personalities, but because there are tricks. Those are tunable approaches that the system makers decide. So it’s weird to have this — in one hand, don’t anthropomorphize, because you’re being manipulated, because you are. But on the other hand, the only useful way is to anthropomorphize. So keep in mind that you are dealing with the choices of the makers.

GPT-4 feels like a workhorse at this point. It is the most neutral of the approaches. It wants to get stuff done for you. And it will happily do that. It doesn’t have a lot of time for chitchat. And then we’ve got Google’s Bard, which feels like — or Gemini now — which feels like it really, really wants to help. We use this for teaching a lot. And we build these scenarios where the A.I. actually acts like a counterparty in a negotiation.

So you get to practice the negotiation by negotiating with the A.I. And it works incredibly well. I’ve been building simulations for 10 years, can’t imagine what a leap this has been. But when we try and get Google to do that, it keeps leaping in on the part of the students, to try and correct them and say, no, you didn’t really want to say this. You wanted to say that. And I’ll play out the scenario as if it went better. And it really wants to kind of make things good for you.

EZRA KLEIN: You were mentioning a minute ago that what the A.I.s do reflect decisions made by their programmers. They reflect guardrails, what they’re going to let the A.I. say. Very famously, Gemini came out and was very woke. You would ask it to show you a picture of soldiers in Nazi Germany, and it would give you a very multicultural group of soldiers, which is not how that army worked. But that was something that they had built in to try to make more inclusive photography generation.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think that’s a very important point. And fundamental about A.I. is the idea that we technically know how LLMs work, but we don’t know how they work the way they do, or why they’re as good as they are. They’re really — we don’t understand it. The theories range from everyone — from it’s all fooling us, to they’ve emulated the way humans think because the structure of language is the structure of human thought. So even though they don’t think, they can emulate it. We don’t know the answer.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing people know about using these models is that hallucinations, just making stuff up, is a problem. Has that changed at all as we’ve moved from GPT-3.5 to 4, as we move from Claude 2 to 3. Like, has that become significantly better? And if not, how do you evaluate the trustworthiness of what you’re being told?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So those are a couple of overlapping questions. The first of them is, it getting better over time? So there is a paper in the field of medical citations that indicated that around 80 to 90 percent of citations had an error, were made up with GPT-3.5. That’s the free version of Chat. And that drops for GPT-4.

EZRA KLEIN: But doesn’t this make them unreliable in a very tricky way? 80 percent — you’re, like, it’s always hallucinating. 20 percent, 5 percent, it’s enough that you can easily be lulled into overconfidence. And one of the reasons it’s really tough here is you’re combining something that knows how to seem extremely persuasive and confident — you feed into the A.I. a 90-page paper on functions and characteristics of right wing populism in Europe, as I did last night.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Absolutely, and I think hard to grasp, because we’re used to things like type II errors, where we search for something on the internet and don’t find it. We’re not used to type I errors, where we search for something and get an answer back that’s made up. This is a challenge. And there’s a couple things to think about. One of those is — I advocate the BAH standard, best available human. So is the A.I. more or less accurate than the best human you could consult in that area?

EZRA KLEIN: But it also reflects something interesting about the nature of the systems. You have a quote here that I think is very insightful. You wrote, “the core irony of generative A.I.s is that A.I.s were supposed to be all logic and no imagination. Instead, we get A.I.s that make up information, engage in seemingly emotional discussions, and which are intensely creative.” And that last fact is one that makes many people deeply uncomfortable.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I love the phrase “a calculator that uses words.” I think we have been let down by science fiction, both in the utopias and apocalypses that A.I. might bring, but also, even more directly, in our view of how machines should work. People are constantly frustrated, and give the same kinds of tests to A.I.s over and over again, like doing math, which it doesn’t do very well — they’re getting better at this.

EZRA KLEIN: But we were using those measures five years ago, even though they were bad. That’s a point you make that I think is interesting and slightly unsettling.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Yeah, we never had to differentiate humans from machines before. It was always easy. So the idea that we had to have a scale that worked for people and machines, who had that? We had the Turing test, which everyone knew was a terrible idea. But since no machine could pass it, it was completely fine. So the question is, how do we measure this? This is an entirely separate set of issues. Like, we don’t even have a definition of sentience or consciousness.

EZRA KLEIN: So one of the things I will sometimes do, and did quite recently, is give the A.I. a series of personal documents, emails I wrote to people I love that were very descriptive of a particular moment in my life. And then I will ask the A.I. about them, or ask the A.I. to analyze me off of them.

ETHAN MOLLICK: That makes complete sense. I think the weird expectations — we call it the jagged frontier of A.I., that it’s good at some stuff and bad at other stuff. It’s often unexpected. It can lead to these weird moments of disappointment, followed by elation or surprise. And part of the reason why I advocate for people to use it in their jobs is, it isn’t going to outcompete you at whatever you’re best at. I mean, I cannot imagine it’s going to do a better job prepping someone for an interview than you’re doing.

And that’s not me just — I’m trying to be nice to you because you’re interviewing me, but because you’re a good interviewer. You’re a famous interviewer. It’s not going to be as good as that. Now, there’s questions about how good these systems get that we don’t know, but we’re kind of at a weirdly comfortable spot in A.I., which is, maybe it’s the 80th percentile of many performances. But I talk to Hollywood writers. It’s not close to writing like a Hollywood writer. It’s not close to being as good an analyst.

EZRA KLEIN: But this gets to this question of, what are you doing with it? The A.I.s right now seem much stronger as amplifiers and feedback mechanisms and thought partners for you than they do as something you can really outsource your hard work and your thinking to. And that, to me, is one of the differences between trying to spend more time with these systems — like, when you come into them initially, you’re like, OK, here’s a problem, give me an answer.

ETHAN MOLLICK: And that’s why the book’s called “Co-Intelligence.” For right now, we have a prosthesis for thinking. That’s, like, new in the world. We haven’t had that before — I mean, coffee, but aside from that, not much else. And I think that there’s value in that. I think learning to be partner with this, and where it can get wisdom out of you or not — I was talking to a physics professor at Harvard. And he said, all my best ideas now come from talking to the A.I. And I’m like, well, it doesn’t do physics that well. He’s like, no, but it asks good questions. And I think that there is some value in that kind of interactive piece.

EZRA KLEIN: We’ve already talked a bit about — Gemini is helpful, and ChatGPT-4 is neutral, and Claude is a bit warmer. But you urge people to go much further than that. You say to give your A.I. a personality. Tell it who to be. So what do you mean by that, and why?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So this is actually almost more of a technical trick, even though it sounds like a social trick. When you think about what A.I.s have done, they’ve trained on the collective corpus of human knowledge. And they know a lot of things. And they’re also probability machines. So when you ask for an answer, you’re going to get the most probable answer, sort of, with some variation in it. And that answer is going to be very neutral. If you’re using GPT-4, it’ll probably talk about a rich tapestry a lot.

It loves to talk about rich tapestries. If you ask it to code something artistic, it’ll do a fractal. It does very normal, central A.I. things. So part of your job is to get the A.I. to go to parts of this possibility space where the information is more specific to you, more unique, more interesting, more likely to spark something in you yourself. And you do that by giving it context, so it doesn’t just give you an average answer. It gives you something that’s specialized for you.

The easiest way to provide context is a persona. You are blank. You are an expert at interviewing, and you answer in a warm, friendly style. Help me come up with interview questions. It won’t be miraculous in the same way that we were talking about before. If you say you’re Bill Gates, it doesn’t become Bill Gates. But that changes the context of how it answers you. It changes the kinds of probabilities it’s pulling from and results in much more customized and better results.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, but this is weirder, I think, than you’re quite letting on here. So something you turned me on to is there’s research showing that the A.I. is going to perform better on various tasks, and differently on them, depending on the personality. So there’s a study that gives a bunch of different personality prompts to one of the systems, and then tries to get it to answer 50 math questions. And the way it got the best performance was to tell the A.I. it was a Starfleet commander who was charting a course through turbulence to the center of an anomaly.

ETHAN MOLLICK: “What the hell” is a good question. And we’re just scratching the surface, right? There’s a nice study actually showing that if you emotionally manipulate the A.I., you get better math results. So telling it your job depends on it gets you better results. Tipping, especially $20 or $100 — saying, I’m about to tip you if you do well, seems to work pretty well. It performs slightly worse in December than May, and we think it’s because it has internalized the idea of winter break.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m sorry, what?

ETHAN MOLLICK: Well, we don’t know for sure, but —

EZRA KLEIN: I’m holding you up here.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: People have found the A.I. seems to be more accurate in May, and the going theory is that it has read enough of the internet to think that it might possibly be on vacation in December?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So it produces more work with the same prompts, more output, in May than it does in December. I did a little experiment where I would show it pictures of outside. And I’m like, look at how nice it is outside? Let’s get to work. But yes, the going theory is that it has internalized the idea of winter break and therefore is lazier in December.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to just note to people that when ChatGPT came out last year, and we did our first set of episodes on this, the thing I told you was this was going to be a very weird world. What’s frustrating about that is that — I guess I can see the logic of why that might be. Also, it sounds probably completely wrong, but also, I’m certain we will never know. There’s no way to go into the thing and figure that out.

ETHAN MOLLICK: And I think that that is, in some ways, both — as you said, the deep weirdness of these systems. But also, there’s actually downside risks to this. So we know, for example, there is an early paper from Anthropic on sandbagging, that if you ask the A.I. dumber questions, it would get you less accurate answers. And we don’t know the ways in which your grammar or the way you approach the A.I. — we know the amount of spaces you put gets different answers.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, I’m interested in the personas, although I just — I really find this part of the conversation interesting and strange. But I’m interested in the personalities you can give the A.I. for a different reason. I prompted you around this research on how a personality changes the accuracy rate of an A.I. But a lot of the reason to give it a personality, to answer you like it is Starfleet Commander, is because you have to listen to the A.I. You are in relationship with it.

ETHAN MOLLICK: The great power of A.I. is as a kind of companion. It wants to make you happy. It wants to have a conversation. And that can be overt or covert.

EZRA KLEIN: Kevin and I have talked a lot about that conversation with Sydney. And one of the things I always found fascinating about it is, to me, it revealed an incredibly subtle level of read by Sydney Bing, which is, what was really happening there? When you say the A.I. wants to make you happy, it has to read on some level what it is you’re really looking for, over time.

ETHAN MOLLICK: It’s a mirror. I mean, it’s trained on our stuff. And one of the revealing things about that, that I think we should be paying a lot more attention to, is the fact that because it’s so good at this, right now, none of the frontier A.I. models with the possible exception of Inflection’s Pi, which has been basically acquired in large part by Microsoft now, were built to optimize around keeping us in a relationship with the A.I. They just accidentally do that.

There are other A.I. models that aren’t as good that have been focused on this, but that has been something explicit from the frontier models they’ve been avoiding till now. Claude sort of breaches that line a little bit, which is part of why I think it’s engaging. But I worry about the same kind of mechanism that inevitably reined in social media, which is, you can make a system more addictive and interesting. And because it’s such a good cold reader, you could tune A.I. to make you want to talk to it more.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to hold here for a minute, because we’ve been talking about how to use frontier models, I think implicitly talking about how to use A.I. for work. But the way that a lot of people are using it is using these other companies that are explicitly building for relationships. So I’ve had people at one of the big companies tell me that if we wanted to tune our system relationally, if we wanted to tune it to be your friend, your lover, your partner, your therapist, like, we could blow the doors off that. And we’re just not sure it’s ethical.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think that is an absolute near-term certainty, and sort of an unstoppable one, that we are going to have A.I. relationships in a broader sense.

And I think the question is, just like we’ve just been learning — I mean, we’re doing a lot of social experiments at scale we’ve never done before in the last couple of decades, right? Turns out social media brings out entirely different things in humans that we weren’t expecting. And we’re still writing papers about echo chambers and tribalism and facts, and what we agree or disagree with.

We’re about to have another wave of this. And we have very little research. And you could make a plausible story up, that what’ll happen is it’ll help mental health in a lot of ways for people, and then there’ll be more social outside, that there might be a rejection of this kind of thing.

EZRA KLEIN: I was worried we were getting off track in the conversation, but I realized we were actually getting deeper on the track I was trying to take us down.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think that’s a temporary state of affairs, like extremely temporary. I think a GPT-4 class model — we actually already know this. They can guess your intent quite well. And I think that this is a way of giving you a sense of agency or control in the short term. I don’t think you’re going to need to know yourself at all. And I think you wouldn’t right now if any of the GPT-4 class models allowed themselves to be used in this way, without guardrails, which they don’t, I think you would already find it’s just going to have a conversation with you and morph into what you want.

EZRA KLEIN: So that’s a little bit chilling, but I’m nevertheless going to stay in this world we’re in, because I think we’re going to be in it for at least a little while longer, where you do have to do all this prompt engineering. What is a prompt, first? And what is prompt engineering?

ETHAN MOLLICK: So a prompt is — technically, it is the sentence, the command you’re putting into the A.I. What it really is is the beginning part of the A.I.s text that it’s processing. And then it’s just going to keep adding more words or tokens to the end of that reply, until it’s done. So a prompt is the command you’re giving the A.I. But in reality, it’s sort of a seed from which the A.I. builds.

EZRA KLEIN: And when you prompt engineer, what are some ways to do that? Maybe one to begin with, because it seems to work really well, is chain of thought.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Just to take a step back, A.I. prompting remains super weird. Again, strange to have a system where the companies making the systems are writing papers as they’re discovering how to use the systems, because nobody knows how to make them work better yet. And we found massive differences in our experiments on prompt types. So for example, we were able to get the A.I. to generate much more diverse ideas by using this chain of thought approach, which we’ll talk about.

EZRA KLEIN: Then you get an answer, and then what?

ETHAN MOLLICK: And then — what you do in a conversational approach is you go back and forth. If you want work output, what you’re going to do is treat it like it is an intern who just turned in some work to you. Actually, could you punch up paragraph two a little bit? I don’t like the example in paragraph one. Could you make it a little more creative, give me a couple of variations? That’s a conversational approach trying to get work done.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to offer an example of how this back and forth can work. So we asked Claude 3 about prompt engineering, about what we’re talking about here. And the way it described it to us is, quote, “It’s a shift from the traditional paradigm of human-computer interaction, where we input explicit commands and the machine executes them in a straightforward way, to a more open ended, collaborative dialogue, where the human and the A.I. are jointly shaping the creative process,” end quote.

And that’s pretty good, I think. That’s interesting. It’s worth talking about. I like that idea that it’s a more collaborative dialogue. But that’s also boring, right? Even as I was reading it, it’s a mouthful. It’s wordy. So I kind of went back and forth with it a few times. And I was saying, listen, you’re a podcast editor. You’re concise, but also then I gave it a couple examples of how I punched up questions in the document, right? This is where the question began. Here’s where it ended. And then I said, try again, and try again, and try again, and make it shorter. And make it more concise.

ETHAN MOLLICK: So I am at a loss about when you went to Claude and when it was you, to be honest. So I was ready to answer at like two points along the way, so that was pretty good from my perspective, sitting here, talking to you. That felt interesting, and felt like the conversation we’ve been having. And I think there’s a couple of interesting lessons there.

The first, by the way, of — interestingly, you asked A.I. about one of its weakest points, which is about A.I. And everybody does this, but because its knowledge window doesn’t include that much stuff about A.I., it actually is pretty weak in terms of knowing how to do good prompting, or what a prompt is, or what A.I.s do well. But you did a good job with that. And I love that you went back and forth and shaped it.

One of the techniques you used to shape it, by the way, was called few-shot, which is giving an example. So the two most powerful techniques are chain of thought, which we just talked about, and few-shot, giving it examples. Those are both well supported in the literature. And then, I’d add personas. So we’ve talked about, I think, the basics of prompt crafting here overall. And I think that the question was pretty good.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the things I realized trying to spend more time with the A.I. is that you really have to commit to this process. You have to go back and forth with it a lot. If you do, you can get really good questions, like the one I just did — or, I think, really good outcomes. But it does take time.

ETHAN MOLLICK: One set of techniques that work quite well is to speed run to where you are in the conversation. So you can actually pick up an older conversation where you got the A.I.’s mindset where you want and work from there. You can even copy and paste that into a new window. You can ask the A.I. to summarize where you got in that previous conversation, and the tone the A.I. was taking, and then when you give a new instruction say the interaction I like to have with you is this, so have it solve the problem for you by having it summarize the tone that you happen to like at the end.

EZRA KLEIN: You did mention something important there, because they’re already getting much bigger in terms of how much information they can hold. Like, the earlier generations could barely hold a significant chat. Now, Claude 3 can functionally hold a book in its memory. And it’s only going to go way, way, way up from here. And I know I’ve been trying to keep us in the present, but this feels to me really quickly like where this is both going and how it’s going to get a lot better.

ETHAN MOLLICK: It’s not even going there. Like, it’s already there. Gemini 1.5 can hold an entire movie, books. But like, it starts to now open up entirely new ways of working. I can show it a video of me working on my computer, just screen capture. And it knows all the tasks I’m doing and suggests ways to help me out. It starts watching over my shoulder and helping me. I put in all of my work that I did prior to getting tenure and said, write my tenure statement. Use exact quotes.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that feels important to keep in front of mind here is that we do have some control over that. And not only do we have some control over it, but business models and policy are important here. And one thing we know from inside these A.I. shops is these A.I.s already are, but certainly will be, really super persuasive.

And so if the later iterations of the A.I. companions are tuned on the margin to try to encourage you to be also out in the real world, that’s going to matter, versus whether they have a business model that all they want is for you to spend a maximum amount of time talking to your A.I. companion, whether you ever have a friend who is flesh and blood be damned.

And so that’s an actual choice, right? That’s going to be a programming decision. And I worry about what happens if we leave that all up to the companies, right? At some point, there’s a lot of venture capital money in here right now. At some point, the venture capital runs out. At some point, people need to make big profits. At some point, they’re in competition with other players who need to make profits. And that’s when things — you get into what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshitification” cycle, where things that were once adding a lot of value to the user begin extracting a lot of value to the user.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I absolutely agree. I think that we have agency here. We have agency in how we operate this in businesses, and whether we use this in ways that encourage human flourishing and employees, or are brutal to them. And we have agency over how this works socially. And I think we abrogated that responsibility with social media, and that is an example. Not to be bad news, because I generally have a lot of mixed optimism and pessimism about parts of A.I., but the bad news piece is there are open source models out there that are quite good.

EZRA KLEIN: I see a lot of reasons to be worried about the open source models. And people talk about things like bioweapons and all that. But for some of the harms I’m talking about here, if you want to make money off of American kids, we can regulate you. So sometimes I feel like we almost, like, give up the fight before it begins. But in terms of what a lot of people are going to use, if you want to be having credit card payments processed by a major processor, then you have to follow the rules.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t think there’s any reason to give up hope on regulation. I think that we can mitigate. And I think part of our job, though, is also not just to mitigate the harms, but to guide towards the positive viewpoints, right? So what I worry about is that the incentive for profit making will push for A.I. that acts informally as your therapist or your friend, while our worries about experimentation, which are completely valid, are slowing down our ability to do experiments to find out ways to do this right.

And I think it’s really important to have positive examples, too. I want to point to the A.I. systems acting ethically as your friend or companion, and figure out what that is, so there’s a positive model to look for. So I’m not just — this is not to denigrate the role of regulation, which I think is actually going to be important here, and self regulation, and rapid response from government, but also the companion problem of, “we need to make some sort of decisions about what are the paragons of this, what is acceptable as a society?”

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to talk a bit about another downside here, and this one more in the mainstream of our conversation, which is on the human mind, on creativity. So a lot of the work A.I. is good at automating is work that is genuinely annoying, time consuming, laborious, but often plays an important role in the creative process. So I can tell you that writing a first draft is hard, and that work on the draft is where the hard thinking happens.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think the idea of struggle is actually a core one in many things. I’m an educator. And one thing that keeps coming out in the research is that there is a strong disconnect between what students think they’re learning and when they learn. So there was a great controlled experiment at Harvard in intro science classes, where students either went to a pretty entertaining set of lectures, or else they were forced to do active learning, where they actually did the work in class.

Not just because, by the way, it makes the work easier, but also because you mentally anchor on the A.I.’s answer. And in some ways, the most dangerous A.I. application, in my mind, is the fact that you have these easy co-pilots in Word and Google Docs, because any writer knows about the tyranny of the blank page, about staring at a blank page and not knowing what to do next, and the struggle of filling that up. And when you have a button that produces really good words for you, on demand, you’re just going to do that. And it’s going to anchor your writing.

We can teach people about the value of productive struggle, but I think that during the school years, we have to teach people the value of writing — not just assign an essay and assume that the essay does something magical, but be very intentional about the writing process and how we teach people about how to do that, because I do think the temptation of what I call “the button” is going to be there otherwise, for everybody.

EZRA KLEIN: But I worry this stretches, I mean, way beyond writing. So the other place I worry about this, or one of the other places I worry about this a lot, is summarizing. And I mean, this goes way back. When I was in school, you could buy Sparknotes. And they were these little, like, pamphlet sized descriptions of what’s going on in “War and Peace” or what’s going on in “East of Eden.”

ETHAN MOLLICK: So I don’t mean to push back too much on this.

EZRA KLEIN: No, please, push back a lot.

ETHAN MOLLICK: But I think you’re right.

EZRA KLEIN: Imagine we’re debating and you are a snarky. A.I. [LAUGHS]

ETHAN MOLLICK: Fair enough. With that prompt —

EZRA KLEIN: With that prompt engineering.

ETHAN MOLLICK: — yeah, I mean, I think that this is the eternal thing about looking back on the next generation, we worry about technology ruining them. I think this makes ruining easier. But as somebody who teaches at universities, like, lots of people are summarizing. Like, I think those of us who enjoy intellectual struggle are always thinking everybody else is going through the same intellectual struggle when they do work. And they’re doing it about their own thing. They may or may not care the same way.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, let me take this from another angle. One of the things that I’m a little obsessed with is the way the internet did not increase either domestic or global productivity for any real length of time. So I mean, it’s a very famous line. You can see the IT revolution anywhere but in the productivity statistics. And then you do get, in the ’90s, a bump in productivity that then peters out in the 2000s.

And so some of the time that was given to us back was also taken back. And I see a lot of dynamics like this that could play out with A.I. — I wouldn’t even just say if we’re not careful, I just think they will play out and already are. I mean, the internet is already filling with mediocre crap generated by A.I. There is going to be a lot of destructive potential, right? You are going to have your sex bot in your pocket, right?

There’s a million things — and not just that, but inside organizations, there’s going to be people padding out what would have been something small, trying to make it look more impressive by using the A.I. to make something bigger. And then, you’re going to use the A.I. to summarize it back down. The A.I. researcher, Jonathan Frankel, described this to me as, like, the boring apocalypse version of A.I., where you’re just endlessly inflating and then summarizing, and then inflating and then summarizing the volume of content between different A.I.

ETHAN MOLLICK: So I think there’s a lot there to chew on. And I also have spent a lot of time trying to think about why the internet didn’t work as well. I was an early Wikipedia administrator.

EZRA KLEIN: Thank you for your service.

ETHAN MOLLICK: [LAUGHS] Yeah, it was very scarring. But I think a lot about this. And I think A.I. is different. I don’t know if it’s different in a positive way. And I think we talked about some of the negative ways it might be different. And I think it’s going to be many things at once, happening quite quickly. So I think the information environment’s going to be filled up with crap. We will not be able to tell the difference between true and false anymore. It will be an accelerant on all the kinds of problems that we have there.

The thing that makes A.I. possibly great is that it’s so very human, so it interacts with our human systems in a way that the internet did not. We built human systems on top of it, but A.I. is very human. It deals with human forms and human issues and our human bureaucracy very well. And that gives me some hope that even though there’s going to be lots of downsides, that the upsides of productivity and things like that are real.

Part of the problem with the internet is we had to digitize everything. We had to build systems that would make our offline world work with our online world. And we’re still doing that. If you go to business schools, digitizing is still a big deal 30 years on from early internet access. A.I. makes this happen much quicker because it works with us. So I’m a little more hopeful than you are about that, but I also think that the downside risks are truly real and hard to anticipate.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that is a good place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

ETHAN MOLLICK: OK, so the books I’ve been thinking about are not all fun, but I think they’re all interesting. One of them is “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” which is — it’s two things. It’s an argument about why we will never have the kind of growth that we did in the first part of the Industrial Revolution again, but I think that’s less interesting than the first half of the book, which is literally how the world changed between 1870 or 1890 and 1940, versus 1940 and 1990, or 2000.

EZRA KLEIN: Ethan Mollick, your book is called “Co-Intelligence.” Your Substack is One Useful Thing. Thank you very much.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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