[petercooper]

I remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.

[drivebyhooting]

What larger problem can you do in a school setting with a calculator?

When doing algebra you need to be able to effortlessly do sums, multiplications, divisions, factorizations.

Meanwhile if you’re doing a physics or engineering calculation, it’s better to manipulate all the symbols algebraically and only plug in values at the final step.

I don’t see how a calculator is actually useful in driving learning outcomes.

[petercooper]

I'll need to engage in conjecture over elementary school lessons from 35 years ago, but one thing that comes to mind is we were calculating circle circumferences and areas quite quickly following the formulas. We still learnt arithmetic techniques by hand (though never logarithms, for whatever reason - I guess calculators replaced the log tables!), but when we moved on to broader things like geometry and statistics, calculator use let us focus on the actual topics and formulas and not repeating the grunt work like generations past.

For anything beyond that, I'd need to take it up with whoever wrote our curriculum! But I know it was mildly contentious at the time, much as the use of even more elaborate technologies are now.

[adampunk]

There’s a bunch of answers to this question, but I think the easiest one is that a pocket calculator contains a table of logarithms.

You can do much of that other stuff by yourself, but no one alive carries a table of logarithms around in their head.

Once you accept that you should also accept that it contains Taylor series expansions for sine and cosine, which you also do not carry around in your head.

I recommend telling a physicist that you feel this way and seeing what they think about calculating machines.

[stanmancan]

Unfortunately people are inherently lazy. Curious and driven indivdiuals will excel with the availability of LLM's, but the majority will atrophy.

[foxyv]

Beware of the false equivalence. AI is not just a calculator that is automating a tedious and repetitive task. It is also automating away things like creativity, research and critical thinking. In addition, we are seeing more and more people use ChatGPT as a source of truth instead of academic literature.

No matter what way you run a math problem, the answer will be the same whether you use a calculator or work it out by hand. This is not the case with AI and the tasks it replaces.

[ragall]

You are making a grave mistaking here of thinking by analogy. Just because parents said something similar about something else long time ago has no bearing on the current situation.

[jbreckmckye]

Calculators are cheap commodities. LLMs are owned by rent-seeking Napoleons, with debts bigger than the GDP of Norway. So they won't be cheap for very long.

[Zecc]

> if you [...] mentally integrate them properly.

There it is.