In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on which the university was built, had committed genocide against Africans and laid the foundations for apartheid. Under the rallying banner of "Rhodes Must Fall," students demanded that the statue be removed. Their protests sparked a global movement to eradicate the colonial legacies that endure in education. The events also provoked Shakir Mohamed, a South African AI researcher at DeepMind, to reflect on what colonial legacies might exist in his research as well.

George Burgess, the founder of Gojimo, a revision app, explores how artificial intelligence can be used within education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dominated tech news in 2016, from Google's ground breaking AlphaGo to Microsoft's racist Tay and Amazon's Echo. This has led to a heated debate on what it means for the human race, from socioeconomic concerns about loss of jobs in the fourth industrial revolution to moral, philosophical and even religious questions about our understanding of human consciousness. Rather than stray into these murky waters, I think it is best to concentrate on the sectors where AI can make a quantifiable and significant difference without threatening livelihoods or invoking metaphysics. One such area is education.