[Espressosaurus]

A calculator is more consistent and faster at calculating than I am, but I still need to understand how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract before I can move on to more complicated math. I need to intuitively understand when I'm getting a garbage result because I did an operation wrong, moved a decimal place by accident, or other problem.

Memorization has a place, and is a requirement for having a large enough knowledge base that you can start synthesizing from different sources and determining when one source is saying something that is contradicted by what should be common knowledge.

Unless your vision of the future is the humans in WALL-E sitting in chairs while watching screens without ever producing anything, you should care about education.

[zkmon]

> A calculator is more consistent and faster at calculating than I am, but I still need to understand how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract..

Exactly. If the calculator knows what to do and how to do, you just need to be able to specify a high level goal, instead of worrying about whether to add or multiply.

[Espressosaurus]

I need to be able to tell when it's garbage in garbage out and I can't do that when I don't understand the operations in question.