The student, however, despite tutorial guidance, can always initiate a new line of discussion leading the system to be responsive to his or her own interests. GEO is currently under development, and while its domain of discourse is simple in terms of the type of knowledge it involves, it seems to us to be a potent tool for exploring learning and tutoring strategies, and eventually other forms of knowledge representation as well. The role of ICAI in teaching and learning The fact that ICAI is an application area of artificial intelligence research and that its goal is to model human tutoring processes, may lead some people to believe that its long-term influence will be a dehumanizing one through which students will become more and more machine-bound and narrow in outlook.