When we think of artificial intelligence in education we think of robot teachers, adaptive intelligent tutors and smart essay marking software, and while these developments have significant impacts in the classroom, they are only a small part of the huge potential artificial intelligence has in the future of education.

Perhaps a more significant power that AI brings to education is connecting the way we learn in an intelligent way to make us humans essentially better at learning, whether it be about ourselves, the world, or how we convey this information to others. But the development of AI also has huge capacities in helping us to develop and measure the complexity of human intelligence - something that no AI system could ever match, but by trying to model it, we begin to understand the foundations of decision making done by humans.

These decisions may be small, insignificant ones that we dont notice much in our daily activity, whether it be deciding what to wear for the day, conversing in a foreign language, or even expressing emotions such as joy, sadness or anxiety. It is only when we attempt to compute these human actions that we realize the depth and complexity they hold and just how much intelligence they require.

As with any form of AI, the development of this intelligence comes with its costs. We need to acknowledge the potential threat of such an interconnected intelligence infrastructure if it were ever to be misused or abused. However, if we do get the ethics right, the AI systems will power our learning needs, and completely transform the way we teach younger generations and assess students, instead of focussing on what we teach them.

For example, a school student could explain to a friend how much they understand about a concept they have recently learned. Their explanation can then be captured and analyzed, and the feedback collected can be offered to the student in an immersive augmented reality experience that corrects their mistakes and misconceptions. Their performance can also be relayed to the teacher, who may go over their original explanation and help them identify mistakes. This gives both the teacher and the student a clearer idea of their progress in a current activity, whether it be Maths, English, or any other subject on the curriculum.

How do we build this intelligence infrastructure for education, to be used for more than just effective marking? By utilizing the integration of big data based on human behavior, deep learning, and our own intelligence to understand the algorithms. We are essentially combining the science behind the way we think and make decisions with our knowledge of machine learning and its foundations. Through this close examination of human behavior, we also begin to understand metacognition, where one has an awareness and understanding of their thought processes.

The potential for this technology is immense. We can collate and analyze large sets of data concerning what we say, what we do, how we dress, what problems and questions we can solve. The analysis of this information will holistically look at our progress as humans and the way we think, instead of just monitoring how well we do in a certain subject or if our test scores have improved. It has the capabilities to even improve the way we behave, whether we work well in a team or not, and how resilient, self-aware, motivated and disciplined we are. Yet the capabilities of this technology can only be positively utilized if there are suitable ethics and security precautions put in place.

While we all have imagined a future where we have robots as teachers and invigilators, papers graded by software, we have to expand our horizons to start understanding the complexity of what AI can offer us, not just as a machine that repeats the same monotonous action over and over again, but as an intelligent network that can help us self-evaluate our own personality traits and capabilities, but also understand human intelligence in a way we never have before.

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How AI Can Help Us Understand The Way We Think and Learn - AI Daily