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I'm afraid this is going to be like the calculator event. Before electronic calculators happened, kids at least learned to mentally do basic math. Now we have

I'm afraid this is going to be like the calculator event. Before electronic calculators happened, kids at least learned to mentally do basic math. Now we have whole generations incapable of making change without a calculator. I met a graduate who claimed 32 ÷ 2 was too difficult because 32 is too big to work with mentally. I believe code development AI is going to lead to a whole generation of mediocre coders.

tuetuopay 2y ago
Ah the calculator, the strawman of every maths teacher. And yet, are we worse at math than the previous generations? I'm not so sure. Pretty quickly math becomes toying with letters and not numbers, and unless the calculator has an algebraic engine, it won't help you. We can focus in more important aspects of math, like actually understanding the concepts. However, to me this will be worse than the calculator: LLM pretend to understand the problem, and can offer solutions. On the other hand, you don't get a calculator with a CAS until late university (if you ever get one). Calculators don't pretend to be more than what they are. But IMHO we'll still get the benefits of calculators: let the humans focus on the difficult tasks. I don't want to write the full API scaffolding for the tenth time. I don't want to write the boilerplate for that test framework for the 15th time. LLMs are good at those tasks, let them do it!
BlueTemplar 2y ago
I don't know what happened to that student (I'm guessing not in a field commonly using math ??), but my experience as a student with access to calculators during exams (sometimes even to programmable calculators) is that they were just slowing you down for simple calculations, resulting in a worse grade if abused, especially since you have to lay out all the intermediate steps anyway. (And you just figure out with experience what the cutoff for 'simple' is, and it raises as you keep getting better at it, just as the bar to what is considered a minimum 'intermediate step' raises with the class level.) But then also the importance of using a calculator as one of the tools to double-check your work (because they make much less mistakes) should not be underestimated... whereas the situation seems to be opposite with LLMs !
- skydhash 2y ago
  Same. In secondary school, calculators was mostly about the trig functions and operating on big numbers. In primary school, you wouldn't have access to a calculators in exams so you learn how to do without. And in university, I mostly had to deal with symbols.

tuetuopay 2y ago

Ah the calculator, the strawman of every maths teacher. And yet, are we worse at math than the previous generations? I'm not so sure. Pretty quickly math becomes toying with letters and not numbers, and unless the calculator has an algebraic engine, it won't help you. We can focus in more important aspects of math, like actually understanding the concepts. However, to me this will be worse than the calculator: LLM pretend to understand the problem, and can offer solutions. On the other hand, you don't get a calculator with a CAS until late university (if you ever get one). Calculators don't pretend to be more than what they are. But IMHO we'll still get the benefits of calculators: let the humans focus on the difficult tasks. I don't want to write the full API scaffolding for the tenth time. I don't want to write the boilerplate for that test framework for the 15th time. LLMs are good at those tasks, let them do it!

BlueTemplar 2y ago

I don't know what happened to that student (I'm guessing not in a field commonly using math ??), but my experience as a student with access to calculators during exams (sometimes even to programmable calculators) is that they were just slowing you down for simple calculations, resulting in a worse grade if abused, especially since you have to lay out all the intermediate steps anyway. (And you just figure out with experience what the cutoff for 'simple' is, and it raises as you keep getting better at it, just as the bar to what is considered a minimum 'intermediate step' raises with the class level.) But then also the importance of using a calculator as one of the tools to double-check your work (because they make much less mistakes) should not be underestimated... whereas the situation seems to be opposite with LLMs !

skydhash 2y ago
Same. In secondary school, calculators was mostly about the trig functions and operating on big numbers. In primary school, you wouldn't have access to a calculators in exams so you learn how to do without. And in university, I mostly had to deal with symbols.