Rethinking Collaboration In The Age Of Hybrid Human Ai Intelligence Fo
Chee-Kit Looi, The Education University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore[email protected] Mutlu Cukurova, University College London[email protected] Dragan Gašević, Monash University[email protected] Yang Yin, The Education University of Hong Kong[email protected] As AI advances from being a passive support tool to an active socio-cognitive partner in education, the concept of “collaboration” between humans and AI demands sharper scrutiny. What does it mean to collaborate with a system that lacks consciousness, yet can proactively co-learn, co-create, and adapt?
What does it mean for humans to work or to learn with a system that exhibits agency even without intelligence? Posted March 12, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch In an era when artificial intelligence increasingly permeates our daily lives, a new paradigm is due to emerge: hybrid intelligence. This concept represents the powerful synthesis of human cognition — with its holistic understanding of brain and body, self and society — and the computational prowess of AI systems. Rather than viewing AI as either a replacement for human intelligence or merely a tool, hybrid intelligence recognizes the complementary strengths of both forms of experience and expression. The first aspect to keep in our human mind as we navigate the unchartered territory of an AI-saturated landscape is that technology inherits human values.
We cannot expect tomorrow's AI systems to embody ethical principles that we ourselves fail to uphold today. The "garbage in, garbage out" principle applies equally to values: values in, values out. AI systems learn from the data we provide and the objectives we set. When trained on biased datasets or optimized for narrow metrics like engagement or profit at the expense of human well-being, these systems predictably perpetuate and amplify existing societal problems. The algorithms powering recommendation systems, hiring tools, and predictive policing don't spontaneously develop ethical frameworks; they reflect the implicit values embedded in their design and training. This reality places a profound responsibility on humans.
Technology will not save us from ourselves. We must deliberately choose which values to embed in our AI systems and actively work to implement them. This isn't simply a technical challenge but an uncomfortably human one that requires honest reflection about our priorities, as individuals and as a society. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 821 (2025) Cite this article The integrating AI into teaching and learning has the potential to transform traditional classroom environments into hybrid intelligence learning environments, whereby human teachers and AI teachers (educational robots) work together synergistically to enhance students’... To understand and optimize the synergistic effect of human–AI collaboration in hybrid intelligence learning environments, this study proposes a human–AI synergy degree model (HAI-SDM).
A case study was conducted to examine the synergy degree and order degree in human–AI collaboration, involving forty students and one teacher from a class in a junior high school. The results indicate that the order degree between human teacher and AI machines remains at a moderate level while undergoing dynamic changes. The synergy degree fluctuates between low and moderate, reflecting relatively orderly development among the three subsystems (collaboration subject subsystem, collaboration process subsystem and collaboration environment subsystem), but one subsystem may exhibit disordered behaviours in... These findings have implications for developing more effective human-AI classroom collaboration and promoting the effective integration of AI into teaching and learning. The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to the education sector. Particularly, under the impetus of human–AI collaboration, AI not only serves as an auxiliary tool to support teachers’ instructional tasks but also actively participates in classroom interactions in an intelligent manner, facilitating a profound...
2024; Zhou and Hou, 2024; Hilpert et al. 2023). Traditional educational models have limitations in facilitating personalized learning and optimizing resource allocation. Human–AI collaborative teaching offers an efficient and sustainable lens to address these challenges through close collaboration between AI systems and teachers (Díaz and Nussbaum, 2024; Chen et al. 2022). Human-AI collaboration in education, as an emerging interdisciplinary field, integrates cutting-edge theories and technologies from AI, education, cognitive science, and human–computer interaction.
The Hybrid Intelligence Learning Environments design aims to develop and implement effective human–AI collaboration in education. Its core philosophy lies in the seamless integration of human intelligence and machine intelligence to achieve optimized teaching outcomes through their synergistic collaboration (Cukurova, 2024; Bredeweg and Kragten, 2022). Within this environment, AI not only functions as an assistant to teachers but also plays a vital role in personalized learning (Mittal et al. 2024), real-time feedback (Weber et al. 2024), cognitive intervention (Fan et al. 2024), and emotional engagement (Järvelä et al.
2023). In recent years, researchers started to look into the design of educational robots, the application of AI in teaching, and the cognitive and behavioural dynamics of human–AI collaboration (Schecter et al. 2022; Niu et al. 2024; Wu et al. 2024). Existing studies have demonstrated significant advantages of human–AI collaboration in enhancing learning efficiency and supporting personalized learning (Huang et al.
2021). For instance, the integration of AI applications in real-time question answering (Fang et al. 2023) and homework grading (Duan et al. 2023) has effectively reduced teachers’ workload while improved instructional quality. The most extensive literature on AI applications in education focused on technological aspects, lacking systematic examination of human-AI collaboration during classroom instruction (Vössing et al. 2022; Yue and Li, 2023).
Given that effective human-AI collaboration relies on effective collaboration between humans and AI systems, investigating the effectiveness of collaboration and the degree of synergy in classrooms becomes crucial. To address this research gap, this study aims to develop a framework to evaluate and enhance the synergy and orderliness of human–AI collaboration in classrooms. Jacob Taylor, Thomas Kehler, Sandy Pentland, Martin Reeves Janice C. Eberly, Molly Kinder, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Lawrence D. W.
Schmidt, Jón Steinsson Rosanne Haggerty, Ruby Bolaria Shifrin, Jacob Taylor, Kershlin Krishna, Sara Bronin, Nick Cain, Xiomara Cisneros, Adam Ruege, Henri Hammond-Paul, Jamie Rife, Josh Humphries, Beth Noveck Work in the future will be a partnership between people, agents, and robots—all powered by artificial intelligence. While much of the current public debate revolves around whether AI will lead to sweeping job losses, our focus is on how it will change the very building blocks of work—the skills that underpin... Our research suggests that although people may be shifted out of some work activities, many of their skills will remain essential. They will also be central in guiding and collaborating with AI, a change that is already redefining many roles across the economy.
In this research, we use “agents” and “robots” as broad, practical terms to describe all machines that can automate nonphysical and physical work, respectively. Many different technologies perform these functions, some based on AI and others not, with the boundaries between them fluid and changing. Using the terms in this expansive way lets us analyze how automation reshapes work overall.1Our analysis considers a broader range of automation technologies than the narrow definition of agents commonly used in the AI... For more on how we define the term, see the Glossary. This report builds on McKinsey’s long-running research on automation and the future of work. Earlier studies examined individual activities, while this analysis also looks at how AI will transform entire workflows and what this means for skills.
New forms of collaboration are emerging, creating skill partnerships between people and AI that raise demand for complementary human capabilities. Although the analysis focuses on the United States, many of the patterns it reveals—and their implications for employers, workers, and leaders—apply broadly to other advanced economies. We find that currently demonstrated technologies could, in theory, automate activities accounting for about 57 percent of US work hours today.2Our analysis focuses exclusively on paid productive hours in the US workforce, encompassing full-time... We assess only the share of time awake that is spent on work-related activities, totaling roughly 45 percent of waking hours. Our analysis excludes time spent on unpaid tasks and leisure, but agents and robots could be used in related activities to support productivity and personal well-being. This estimate reflects the technical potential for change in what people do, not a forecast of job losses.
As these technologies take on more complex sequences of tasks, people will remain vital to make them work effectively and do what machines cannot. Our assessment reflects today’s capabilities, which will continue to evolve, and adoption may take decades. Reading and share my thinking about stanford article rethinking-human-ai-agent-collaboration-for-the-knowledge-worke 2025 has emerged as the “Year of AI Agents.” Yet, beneath the headlines lies a more fundamental inquiry: what does this truly mean for professionals in knowledge-intensive industries—law, finance, consulting, and beyond? We are witnessing a paradigm shift: LLMs are no longer merely tools, but evolving into intelligent collaborators—AI agents acting as “machine colleagues.” This transformation is redefining human-machine interaction and reconstructing the core of what... Traditional legal and consulting workflows follow a pipeline model—linear, hierarchical, and role-bound.
AI agents introduce a more fluid, adaptive mode of working—closer to collaborative design or team sports. In this model, tasks are distributed based on contextual awareness and capabilities, not rigid roles. This shift requires AI agents and humans to co-navigate multi-objective, fast-changing workflows, with real-time alignment and adaptive task planning as core competencies. As I sat down with Jim Wilson, global managing director of thought leadership and technology at Accenture and co-author of the newly updated book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI,... In a world where groundbreaking AI advancements seem to be delivered each month, Wilson offers a refreshingly optimistic perspective that cuts through the noise. Rather than viewing AI as a job-stealing threat, he presents compelling evidence for a future built on collaborative intelligence.
"There's an emerging kind of collaborative intelligence that companies are going to need now to compete and innovate," Wilson explained during our conversation. "It's really about thoughtfully and rigorously creating that combined effect where human ingenuity, human innovation, plus AI systems outperform what either one could do alone." To illustrate this point, Wilson shared the fascinating story of a Lithuanian researcher who ingeniously repurposed AlphaFold (an AI system for predicting protein structures) to solve complex protein interaction problems that its creators hadn't... The result? A scientific breakthrough that combined human creativity with AI processing power. "On the human side, previous methods could achieve about 74 percent accuracy.
But that often took weeks of manual effort," Wilson noted. "On the AI side, AlphaFold would have essentially scored a zero. But through human and machine collaboration, we actually see an effect where they were able to achieve 88 percent precision in just a few hours." A new book looks at how the integration of artificial and human intelligence will impact individuals, organizations, and society. In their new book, “SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, and Work in the Age of Intelligence,” Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher look at how emerging technologies create opportunities for transformation and even the... Among these transformations is what they call “IntelliFusion,” or “the convergence and seamless integration of artificial intelligence with human intelligence, blurring the boundaries between machine and human cognition and giving rise to hybrid intelligence...
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Chee-Kit Looi, The Education University Of Hong Kong And Nanyang
Chee-Kit Looi, The Education University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore[email protected] Mutlu Cukurova, University College London[email protected] Dragan Gašević, Monash University[email protected] Yang Yin, The Education University of Hong Kong[email protected] As AI advances from being a passive support tool to an active socio-cognitive partner in education, the con...
What Does It Mean For Humans To Work Or To
What does it mean for humans to work or to learn with a system that exhibits agency even without intelligence? Posted March 12, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch In an era when artificial intelligence increasingly permeates our daily lives, a new paradigm is due to emerge: hybrid intelligence. This concept represents the powerful synthesis of human cognition — with its holistic understanding of bra...
We Cannot Expect Tomorrow's AI Systems To Embody Ethical Principles
We cannot expect tomorrow's AI systems to embody ethical principles that we ourselves fail to uphold today. The "garbage in, garbage out" principle applies equally to values: values in, values out. AI systems learn from the data we provide and the objectives we set. When trained on biased datasets or optimized for narrow metrics like engagement or profit at the expense of human well-being, these s...
Technology Will Not Save Us From Ourselves. We Must Deliberately
Technology will not save us from ourselves. We must deliberately choose which values to embed in our AI systems and actively work to implement them. This isn't simply a technical challenge but an uncomfortably human one that requires honest reflection about our priorities, as individuals and as a society. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 821 (2025) Cite this...
A Case Study Was Conducted To Examine The Synergy Degree
A case study was conducted to examine the synergy degree and order degree in human–AI collaboration, involving forty students and one teacher from a class in a junior high school. The results indicate that the order degree between human teacher and AI machines remains at a moderate level while undergoing dynamic changes. The synergy degree fluctuates between low and moderate, reflecting relatively...