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.
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
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?
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).
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.