[z_]

This is a thought provoking piece.

“But at what cost?”

We’ve all accepted calculators into our lives as being faster and correct when utilized correctly (Minus Intel tomfoolery), but we emphasize the need to know how to do the math in educational settings.

Any post education adult will confirm when confronted with an irregular math problem (or a skill) that there is a wait time to revive the ability.

Programming automation having the potential skill decay AND being critical path is … worth thinking about.

[xorcist]

Comparisons with deterministic tools such as calculators will always lead astray. There is no comparable situation where faced with a new problem the AI will just give up. If there is the need for an expert, the need is always there, because there is no indication external to the process that the process will fail.

[alex989]

I disagree about how calculators and math are deterministic a in real world scenarios where you use math at work. When you compute a formula in your calculator or in a fancy design software, it will always give you answer but it doesn't mean you asked the right question. If you use the wrong units in your input or if you make a typo, if you used the wrong formula, etc., the calculator/software will blindly give you an answer and only an experienced engineer will spot it a first glance. As soon as there is a human in the loop, things get messy.

For exemple, if your calculator tells you that a 15m long W200x31 steel beam can resist 215kN•m in bending moment, I know at first glance its at least 4x too much for that length, but how many people reading my comment could? A civil engineer fresh out of college would not.

[singpolyma3]

Calculators don't do math, they do calculating. Which is to say, they don't think for you. There's not much value in being able to quickly compute some expression in a world with calculators. But there's a huge value in knowing how to know which numbers to feed into the calculation.

[kurthr]

The biggest problem with calculators (rather than slide rules), was that because calculations with big numbers (large mantissa) were so easy, people got used to doing them that way without consideration.

Using a slide rule meant inherently knowing order-of-magnitude, rounding, and precision. Once calculators make it easy they enable both new kinds of solutions and new kinds of errors (that you have to separately teach to avoid).

At the same time, I basically agree. Humans are very bad calculators and we've needed tools (abacus) for millennia.

[bitwize]

I derive tremendous value from being able to calculate taxes, tips, and so forth in my head, or right on the receipt, without having to reach for my phone and launch Droid48. (I know some of y'all are also Droid48 bros.) It's even more profound a convenience than knowing how to drive Emacs with just the keyboard and not having to reach for the goddamn mouse.

[eastbound]

We already have generational programming decay. At 25 years old, kids fresh out of uni can’t write a string.contains() routine. They all use .stream() in Java. Matter of generation, fashion and skills to learn. And concerning the programming of C drivers, Apple is the last company to write a filesystem and they already can’t find anyone able to do it.