"Just like there are advanced sensors that can help us detect sound and light beyond our bodily senses, there are transformative tools that can help us think beyond what was previously thinkable. We can engineer “spacecraft” for venturing into the depths of conceptual space, exploring what lies beyond the pale blue dot of native human cognition." - Paul Bricman on his website
"What if you had a virtual assistant when navigating your thoughts? What if there was a Photoshop for editing concepts? What if you could radically edit your belief system on command? What if you could digest a textbook an order of magnitude faster? What if you could manipulate abstract representations with your body? Those are precisely the muddy, challenging, and daring questions we’re interested in." - Paul Bricman on his website
I think there are huge advances to be made with tools for thought in learning optimization. To me, the biggest gains will come from those tools which explicitly attempt to match new information with the learner's prior knowledge at a granular level.
Tools for thought have the capacity to invert the traditional top-down curriculum by providing a personalized educational recommender system directly targeted at an individual's unique interests and prior knowledge, rather than delivering information that should be compatible with average prior knowledge of 300 people in a college class.
The tools I'm envisioning could for example know the history and probability of recall for all of the information you had added into your SRS, it would know your current interests by analysing your personal notes and behaviour in your incremental reading system. It would be radically individualist and could dynamically update second by second as it gathers more information about the user.