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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> why didn't math disappear when calculators were built?

Because you can see a child using a calculator.

> Why didn't teaching go out of fashion when TV was invented

Laws (which put students in classrooms) and a lack of TV use in classrooms. TV use in classrooms was generally driven by the teachers.

> "ChatGPT is different than anything that has come before, and will change everything"

It's effectively undetectable when used, unless you have students write essays in your presence and on paper. That's what makes it so much harder to counter than previous aids.

WRT writing large essays on paper - it's a skill that's not useful and is thus not emphasized in any class - a trend that's existed longer than ChatGPT. Reversing it now would impact all grades, and face major pushback from parents.

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You can see someone using AI too.

The problem here is not with children. Children learn in classrooms with teachers who supervise them closely all day. Preventing them using calculators, smartphones, laptops, or whatever else, is very easy assuming you have the basics of classroom discipline in place. This genre of articles bemoaning the effect of LLMs on cheating is coming exclusively from universities, and it's noticeable how the most obvious solution of having students just do the work in class whilst the teacher watches is completely unthinkable to them. It works fine in high school, but universities refuse to do it.

They could do, of course. It doesn't have to be the professors who supervise. Anyone can patrol a hall, or heck, why not use AI to do it? The local CS department can easily knock up some ML models that detect students using smartphones via CCTV. Provisioned laptops can be locked down with recorded screens, etc. Fundamentally supervising students can be done at scale, but universities would apparently rather let their classes and credentials sink (further) into meaninglessness rather than change their ways.

>Because you can see a child using a calculator.

Besides, a calculator no more threatens the study of math than a word processor does writing, or a rhyming dictionary poetry. One reason is that if you hand me a TI-84, I'm not magically going to understand how to do calculus. Maybe I could somewhat piece things together, but probably not without accidentally . . . learning calculus. The other reason is that, as I am led to believe, the particular values and operations that happen in the field of Serious Math are much more incidental to the actual concepts in question than it may seem early on.

Hell, calculators haven't even really managed to supplant the study of arithmetic. They seem to have settled nicely into where they're useful.

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