[fainpul]

> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator.

I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equilibrium where it takes the same effort to take out the calculator and focus on typing, as it would to strain the brain doing it without a calculator.

> We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.

When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.

[rimliu]

No. These tools are very good at creating illusion of learning, without any learning. When you watch them do stuff, you think, yeah I got this. Once they are gone, you realize all your supposed skill is gone too. Getting a skill requires deliberate practice. You can use AI for that, but just using AI is not that.

[californical]

Why no? It sounds like you agree with the person you replied to

[prerok]

There's an old Latin proverb "Scribere bis legere", which translates to "writing is reading twice".

In practice, what this means is that you can read some subject many times, but you would still struggle to reproduce the content by yourself. That is why, when learning, it is not sufficient to just read the material several times.

[ekeke]

Spot on there’s an easy test.

Ask said person who learned something to describe it back to you in their own words.

Then watch them fumble :)

The second test is - explain it in such simple terms that someone who has barely any knowledge of it can understand it.

[graydsl]

I would also argue, that most school system forbid the usage of a calculator the first couple of years (at least that's how it was Germany a few decades ago). The same with writing per hand. You can spell check by looking the word up and then manually correcting it.

Both require manual "labor" which leads to learning.

[hirako2000]

And calculators took decades to become widespread. So we could learn of their side effects before they became mainstream.

Also to note. Calculators merely solve intermediary steps. LLMs are increasingly designed to do a one shot full blown work. Longer context, deep thinking, agentic loops.

[Izkata]

> > We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.

> When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.

I was in highschool right as spellcheckers were becoming common, and the general consensus among us as students was that they made us worse for exactly that reason: We could just click the spellcheck button and "accept all", so most of us stopped learning the right way to spell words we had trouble with.