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What happens when we teach a computer how to learn?

This summer, Georgia Tech, a university in Atlanta in the US, deployed a teaching assistant called Jill Watson for one of its postgraduate courses.

My daughter is a teacher. She was delighted to hear that she might get back 2 hours of her life each day if a robot could mark her pupils' homework.

Teaching computers to understand casual, contextual conversation in every language and accent is key to this quest to normalise our interactions with computers and to place Google even more squarely at the centre of our lives.

"Thinking is hard - yet barely a waking moment passes when we're not labouring away at it. A few of us may be natural geniuses, able to work through the toughest tangles in an instant; others, blessed with reserves of willpower, stay the course in the dogged pursuit of truth. Then there's the rest of us. Not prodigies and a little bit lazy, but still aspiring to understand the world and our place in it. What can we do? In Intuition Pumps, Daniel Dennett, one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers, takes us on a profound, illuminating and highly entertaining philosophical journey. He reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with new discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. In his genial style, Dennett guides readers around the pitfalls in arguments, and reveals easier ways to better understand the world around us and our place in it. An enlightening and practical store of knowledge, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking will teach you to think truly independently and creatively."

Video from a series of events at British Council looking at 'How we learn' this video is one session where Sam Conniff looks at the difference in the world of learning and education. He talks about the 'sharing economy' bring the largest growing market in the works and then changes technology is having on what we teach in schools worldwide, including the fact that 70% of all on-one content is video, making the creation of content closer to the user. Highlighting the top things people learning on-line using the search 'how to...' Play in instrument, learn a language and write code.Sam also explores the notion of 'Learning how to learn', 'being connected to the internet everywhere', & 'transparency' and how these will change Education & how we will need to interact in a more ethical way (26:40 - 43:00)