The rise of technology within the education sector over the last few decades has been astounding. This is certainly the case if we consider that teaching with technology has become pervasive in almost every classroom environment. Within today's classroom, for example, we find ourselves surrounded by devices such as smart boards, AV, computers, laptops, tablets and phones, to name but a few technologies which are now being integrated into teaching. We have also seen the rise of the virtual learning environment and blended learning, alongside a significant rise in online education. This has allowed distance learning to take new forms and shapes and to reach greater audiences around the world.

In the last few years, machine learning applications have quietly entered every aspect of life: social media to speech recognition, radiology to retail, warfare to writing articles, coding to customer service, robotics to route optimization. During the 40 year information age, we told computers what to do. With advances in artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, and faster processing chips we can feed computers giant data sets and they can (in narrow slivers) draw some inferences on their own. As we reported in Ask About AI, the rise of code that learns marks the beginning of a new era of augmented intelligence. It's a great opportunity for us to expand access to a great education and for young people to make a big contribution.