This story was published in partnership with The Moonshot Catalog. In the late 1960s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon posed the following thought exercise: Imagine you are an alien from Mars visiting a college on Earth, and you spend a day observing how professors teach their students. Simon argued that you would describe the process as "outrageous." "If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and the other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall," he wrote in a 1967 issue of Education Record. "We find no one with a professional knowledge in the laws of learning, or the techniques for applying them," he wrote. Teaching at colleges is often done without any formal training. Mimicry of others who are equally untrained, instinct, and what feels right tend to provide the guidance. As a result, teaching is, to use another building metaphor, not up to code. There are widespread beliefs about the best way to teach and learn that have been proven wrong by science, yet they persist. Reading back over a textbook or taking lecture notes with a highlighter at the ready is often done by students, for instance, but these practices have proven of limited merit, and in some cases even counterproductive in aiding recall.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) were supposed to bring a revolution in education. But they haven't lived up to the expectations. We have been putting educators in front of cameras and shooting video -- just as the first TV shows did with radio stars, microphone in hand. This is not to say the millions of hours of online content are not valuable; the limits lie in the ability of the underlying technology to customise the material to the individual and to coach. That is about to change, though, through the use of virtual reality, artificial intelligence and sensors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing, but how can you use it to create a better learning experience? Look at any list of disruptive technologies and AI is likely to be at the top, it's the latest tech buzzword to take over the news media. As an L&D professional, what should you be paying close attention to? And what's safe to ignore? Our round up of the more useful applications of AI for learning includes many of the leading examples from academia and adult education that will be filtering their way into the workplace learning environment as AI becomes more widespread.

Though still in its infancy, artificial intelligence already is changing the world. However, it's not just about what the technology itself can do, but what it enables people to do -- what new doors it can open. AI presents government agencies with new opportunities to innovate that previously may have been impossible. AI is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of capabilities that allow computer systems to perform tasks normally done by humans. Many people also are familiar with the term "cognitive computing." Cognitive leverages several AI components, such as machine learning, to understand, reason, learn and interact with humans naturally.

The Obama administration released a report on the future of artificial intelligence and addressed everything including job loss, ethics, bias, and positive outcomes for multiple industries. There are some things that machines are simply better at doing than humans, but humans still have plenty going for them. Here's a look at how the two are going to work in concert to deliver a more powerful future for IT, and the human race. There's a lot to digest in the full report, which has been noted in multiple places. I pulled out a few key talking points to ponder as AI advances.