2: Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Available to Purchase

By the middle of the 21st century, the word intelligence is doing more work than ever before. It names both a deeply human capacity, shaped by biology, culture, and education, and a rapidly advancing suite of computational systems that can converse in natural language, classify images, and adapt to learner behavior. This chapter delineates human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) along four dimensions: how each is perceived in academia, their strengths, their limits, and their implications for learning. Rather than treating AI as a rival to human intelligence, the chapter frames them as distinct but interdependent. Human learners bring meaning, values, and contextual judgment; AI systems offer speed, scale, and pattern recognition. Understanding both, on their own terms, is a prerequisite for any serious conversation about “synthetic intelligence” in education.