Howard Gardner changed how the world defines intelligence. His 1983 book Frames of Mind introduced the theory of multiple intelligences, the idea that human intellect is not a single number but a plural set of capacities.
His current work asks what it means to be smart when machines process information faster than we do. "What it meant to be smart was constant until the 21st century," he says. "No one, except for science fiction writers, anticipated large language models that would rapidly exceed human beings by most definitions of intellect." Gardner's answer centers on synthesis: the capacity to take in large amounts of information, organize and reorganize it, and produce insight on complex problems. He studies how to train that capacity in schools and workplaces, and how to intertwine it with the synthesizing power, and possible biases, of computational systems. His intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, traces the idea across his own career. He is also leading a research project on how education, from cradle to grave, needs to be reconceptualized and reconfigured in the age of ever more powerful AI entities.
Howard GardnerJohn H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education