"Have you heard the rumor about butter? Go ahead and roll your eyes. This groaner is just one of the many, many terrible jokes that Amazon's "personal assistant" software, Alexa, will tell you -- if you ask. But Alexa can do a lot more than make bad puns. Many people start their mornings by asking Alexa for the weather forecast or the latest news. A device that houses the software can also play music from your favorite playlists, keep a shopping list, order takeout food, answer trivia questions, send voice messages and even run "smart" home controls like thermostats. Alexa is a form of artificial intelligence, or AI for short.

Schools may be critiqued as "factories," but robots aren't going to replace human teachers any time soon. Still, that doesn't mean that artificially intelligent systems won't transform education just as they are changing a variety of fields and practices, from the way oncologists diagnose cancer to how lawyers analyze cases. Intelligent-tutoring systems like ALEKS (for Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces), Cognitive Tutor, and a new program in development by IBM's Watson initiative are starting to expand in K-12 education, and experts argue that teachers need new training not only to use intelligent systems in the classroom but also to prepare students for careers in increasingly technology-integrated fields. "Any skill that a computer can teach is going to be done by a computer in the workplace, and that's something people don't think about enough," said Christopher Dede, an education and technology professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For that reason, he said, teachers can use computer programs not simply to replace pieces of their instruction, but to model for students how to work with technology professionally.

Struggling algebra students in the Everett, Wash., school district get help from special tutors who diagnose their weaknesses, tailor instruction to their needs, and provide on-the-spot feedback-all with an inhuman degree of patience. That's inhuman literally: The tutors are computers. Three years ago, the district started employing Cognitive Tutor, a series of computer programs based on artificial intelligence that were developed by researchers from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The programs provide an alternative form of math instruction to secondary school students who haven't succeeded in regular classrooms. The experience proved so successful that officials in the 20,000-student district have expanded the program.