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<Shrugs in passive aggressive> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard

<Shrugs in passive aggressive> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.

giantg2 2y ago
Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.
- parpfish 2y ago
  Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework). Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head. like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
- rthrth45y 2y ago
  Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example. I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
- ben_w 2y ago
  The results of a calculator are only easy to verify with either someone who can do the same arithmetic or who has another calculator. I had this happen to me once while shopping, where I could immediately tell that three items costing less than £1 each should not come to a total of more than £3, but the cashier needed that explained to them. (And that's aside from anything about asking LLMs to output in a format suitable for mechanical validation, which they can generally do).
- Izkata 2y ago
  > Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning On their own they would. We just don't see it very much because of external forces managing it - like teachers not allowing students to use them early in school.
StefanBatory 2y ago
No, I can't agree with you here. I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have. And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time. And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction. Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does xxxxxxxxx ... (edit) as pointed out below, a penny plus a $0.99 charge means that the cashier can return a whole number of bills, avoiding any coins..
  - abanana 2y ago
    The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins. It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Another possibility: "The register says 99 cents change and I am not paid enough to give any more of a damn than that."
      - pessimizer 2y ago
        If you have basic comfort in arithmetic, this is not a calculation that involves giving a damn. Being confused about why someone would give you an extra penny and having a discussion about it with a stranger burns 100x more calories than knowing it. If basic arithmetic involves taking a deep breath and closing your eyes for half a minute, or looking around the room for a calculator, that's a different cost/benefit analysis. It's like the difference between a language you are fluent in and a language you are tentative in. If you're fluent, you have to make an effort not to listen to somebody's loud conversation, or not to pay attention to a billboard. They intrude into your consciousness. There's never a situation when I don't do simple arithmetic when exposed to it. I don't have to consciously figure out what 4 times 9 is. Subjectively, the number just pops into my head when I see the question. edit: If you can't do this with explanations of identities or related rates, etc., it's hard or impossible to follow any quantitative or especially probabilistic argument. Even the simplest ones. I think this results in people for whom arithmetic is difficult faking it by trying to memorize the words used during quantitative arguments without having any real understanding. Just sort of memorizing a lot of slogans and repeating them during any argument that shares similar words. I think discomfort with arithmetic ruins people politically (as citizens), so I really do think calculators are a problem.
blibble 2y ago
the difference is I still understand everything the calculator can do, and can do it by hand on paper the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  And worse, the people who control the AIs now have ultimate power to rewrite history and mold opinion. If they want everyone to think the earth is flat they can do it.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> <passive aggressive> > life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now. Aggression against what? Yourself? I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take? Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour. Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort? Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    That is very interesting. Are you talking like city simulation games? I get the entertainment of quite passively tweaking and watching things unfold. But at what point would you say "hey I'm not really a participating player any more, this is just watching TV"? Is it still a game at that point?
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Strategy games, actually; namely Princess Connect! Re:Dive and Fire Emblem Heroes. My hand is mostly in gearing up characters and composing parties who then take on maps and stages on their own as I watch, including bosses. It's actually surprisingly fun, like you I was in the "why would I let a game play for me?" camp before. As they say, don't knock it until you try it. Meanwhile, the third game I mentioned which is Fate/Grand Order explicitly does not have any autoplay functionality, and it too is very fun.
s0ss 2y ago
Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance: Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones. Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach. Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
wredue 2y ago
A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  > A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Do you have a link or more info? Without further context, the 41% doesn't tell us the whole story; all we have is a numerator lacking a denominator. Did bugs per line of code go up, or down? Did # LOC produced after using AI go up/down? For all we know, the increase in productivity caused average bugs per line to go down, rather than up, which is contrary to the argument you're making.
  - wredue 2y ago
    https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding Efficiency does not go up. In fact, the users claims that they are more productive do not stand up to scrutiny. Code quality decreases. This is why I don’t just believe what people say. It makes no sense to me that something I am observing is sneaking in little bugs on nearly every suggestion somehow saves time. It logically cannot be true that reading output code to make sure it is doing what you want is significantly faster than just writing what’s in your head. Then it is supposedly good for boilerplate, but like, code templates have existed forever. There’s been tools with prescriptive, deterministic output that handle boilerplate for you for ages. So again here, it makes literally zero sense that a non-deterministic output is actually handling boilerplate better than just setting your env up properly.
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      I would have to look more into their methodology, but it’s fair to say that the AI coding tools are so new that workflows using them are still being themselves standardized. Interaction models are being prototyped. I’m willing to believe that those posting on HN about their experiences with AI coding tools are doing so in good faith and also are probably able to evaluate their own experiences faithfully. They aren’t gaslighting themselves, as most folks using them for work are assumed to be doing useful work with them over baseline of not using the AI coding tools, or they wouldn’t use them. Good enough works. By that same token, those who are not having better than baseline experiences with AI coding tools are probably “holding it wrong”/using the tools in a manner that they are ill-suited for etc. Those devs are probably not able to assess their own performance as well as those who are more proficient at coding generally, even without using AI coding tools. Basically, good programmers are better able to use programming tools, even AI coding tools that are somewhat buggy in their implementations and/or output. Using the wrong tool for the job or using the right tool improperly is not an indictment of the tool, but of the user. A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A quality craftsperson accepts their tools for what they are and aren’t, and adapts their tools and adapts to their tools accordingly.
lawn 2y ago
> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?

giantg2 2y ago

Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.

parpfish 2y ago
Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework). Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head. like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
rthrth45y 2y ago
Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example. I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
ben_w 2y ago
The results of a calculator are only easy to verify with either someone who can do the same arithmetic or who has another calculator. I had this happen to me once while shopping, where I could immediately tell that three items costing less than £1 each should not come to a total of more than £3, but the cashier needed that explained to them. (And that's aside from anything about asking LLMs to output in a format suitable for mechanical validation, which they can generally do).
Izkata 2y ago
> Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning On their own they would. We just don't see it very much because of external forces managing it - like teachers not allowing students to use them early in school.

StefanBatory 2y ago

No, I can't agree with you here. I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have. And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time. And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.

givemeethekeys 2y ago

My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction. Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.

mistrial9 2y ago
except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does xxxxxxxxx ... (edit) as pointed out below, a penny plus a $0.99 charge means that the cashier can return a whole number of bills, avoiding any coins..
- abanana 2y ago
  The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins. It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Another possibility: "The register says 99 cents change and I am not paid enough to give any more of a damn than that."
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      If you have basic comfort in arithmetic, this is not a calculation that involves giving a damn. Being confused about why someone would give you an extra penny and having a discussion about it with a stranger burns 100x more calories than knowing it. If basic arithmetic involves taking a deep breath and closing your eyes for half a minute, or looking around the room for a calculator, that's a different cost/benefit analysis. It's like the difference between a language you are fluent in and a language you are tentative in. If you're fluent, you have to make an effort not to listen to somebody's loud conversation, or not to pay attention to a billboard. They intrude into your consciousness. There's never a situation when I don't do simple arithmetic when exposed to it. I don't have to consciously figure out what 4 times 9 is. Subjectively, the number just pops into my head when I see the question. edit: If you can't do this with explanations of identities or related rates, etc., it's hard or impossible to follow any quantitative or especially probabilistic argument. Even the simplest ones. I think this results in people for whom arithmetic is difficult faking it by trying to memorize the words used during quantitative arguments without having any real understanding. Just sort of memorizing a lot of slogans and repeating them during any argument that shares similar words. I think discomfort with arithmetic ruins people politically (as citizens), so I really do think calculators are a problem.

blibble 2y ago

the difference is I still understand everything the calculator can do, and can do it by hand on paper the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards

SoftTalker 2y ago
And worse, the people who control the AIs now have ultimate power to rewrite history and mold opinion. If they want everyone to think the earth is flat they can do it.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> <passive aggressive> > life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now. Aggression against what? Yourself? I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take? Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour. Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?

Dalewyn 2y ago
>To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort? Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  That is very interesting. Are you talking like city simulation games? I get the entertainment of quite passively tweaking and watching things unfold. But at what point would you say "hey I'm not really a participating player any more, this is just watching TV"? Is it still a game at that point?
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Strategy games, actually; namely Princess Connect! Re:Dive and Fire Emblem Heroes. My hand is mostly in gearing up characters and composing parties who then take on maps and stages on their own as I watch, including bosses. It's actually surprisingly fun, like you I was in the "why would I let a game play for me?" camp before. As they say, don't knock it until you try it. Meanwhile, the third game I mentioned which is Fate/Grand Order explicitly does not have any autoplay functionality, and it too is very fun.

s0ss 2y ago

Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance: Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones. Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach. Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.

wredue 2y ago

A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.

aspenmayer 2y ago
> A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Do you have a link or more info? Without further context, the 41% doesn't tell us the whole story; all we have is a numerator lacking a denominator. Did bugs per line of code go up, or down? Did # LOC produced after using AI go up/down? For all we know, the increase in productivity caused average bugs per line to go down, rather than up, which is contrary to the argument you're making.
- wredue 2y ago
  https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding Efficiency does not go up. In fact, the users claims that they are more productive do not stand up to scrutiny. Code quality decreases. This is why I don’t just believe what people say. It makes no sense to me that something I am observing is sneaking in little bugs on nearly every suggestion somehow saves time. It logically cannot be true that reading output code to make sure it is doing what you want is significantly faster than just writing what’s in your head. Then it is supposedly good for boilerplate, but like, code templates have existed forever. There’s been tools with prescriptive, deterministic output that handle boilerplate for you for ages. So again here, it makes literally zero sense that a non-deterministic output is actually handling boilerplate better than just setting your env up properly.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    I would have to look more into their methodology, but it’s fair to say that the AI coding tools are so new that workflows using them are still being themselves standardized. Interaction models are being prototyped. I’m willing to believe that those posting on HN about their experiences with AI coding tools are doing so in good faith and also are probably able to evaluate their own experiences faithfully. They aren’t gaslighting themselves, as most folks using them for work are assumed to be doing useful work with them over baseline of not using the AI coding tools, or they wouldn’t use them. Good enough works. By that same token, those who are not having better than baseline experiences with AI coding tools are probably “holding it wrong”/using the tools in a manner that they are ill-suited for etc. Those devs are probably not able to assess their own performance as well as those who are more proficient at coding generally, even without using AI coding tools. Basically, good programmers are better able to use programming tools, even AI coding tools that are somewhat buggy in their implementations and/or output. Using the wrong tool for the job or using the right tool improperly is not an indictment of the tool, but of the user. A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A quality craftsperson accepts their tools for what they are and aren’t, and adapts their tools and adapts to their tools accordingly.

lawn 2y ago

> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?