With that said, I do worry that losing the ability to craft sentences (or code) is more problematic than losing the ability to do mental math.
Losing the ability to do calculations by hand on a piece of paper with a pencil probably actually is a big deal
When I went to school we still had to do a lot of calculations by hand on paper. Thus, if I use a calculator to get an answer, I'm capable of reproducing the answer by hand if necessary
With math, at least when I was learning it, we seemed to understand that the calculator is a useful tool that doesn't replace the need to develop underlying skills
I'm seeing the exact opposite behavior and mentality from the AI crowd. "You don't need to learn how to do that correctly anymore, you can just have the AI do it"
"Vibe Coding", literally the attitude that you don't need to understand your code anymore. You just have the AI generate it and go off vibes to decide if it's right or not
Yeah, I don't know how my car engine works. But I trust that the people who engineered it do, and the mechanics that fix it when it breaks do. There's no room for "Vibe Bridge Building" in reality
Anyone advocating for "Vibe coding" is an admission that it doesn't actually matter if the thing they build works or not
Unfortunately that seems to be a growing portion of software
There are a lot of calculators and other tools that can push the symbols around and many that can even apply some special high-level mathematical rules to the symbols. But whether or not those rules are relevant to the task at hand is entirely a matter for a human to decide.
Brace yourself for a wave of think pieces a year from now, all wringing their hands about the death of vibe coding, and the return of artisanal handmade software.
I think it’s a huge deal. I see a lot of people do some financing stuff and they have no idea what a 20% interest rate really means. So they just go ahead and do it because taking out a calculator is too tedious. I find it pretty crazy how many can’t figure how much a 20% or even 10% is. A lot of financial offerings take advantage of the fact that people can’t do even basic math.
Edit: At best, it shows that the person doesn't really know how to calculate that even with a calculator
At worst, it shows that the person lacks of any kind of give a fuck at all
Either way, they probably would not likely have learned the mental math required to do this regardless of if it were being taught at school or not
What it shows is that 10% means nothing to them. It's just another number that a calculator will spit out. It's not "one out of ten" or "shift everything to the right." They have no ability to evaluate what the number means on the fly. They just plug it into the calculator and check if they have that much. They can't have a reasonable discussion about the number without stopping and calculating every interest rate they can think of, writing them down on a piece of people, and writing the budget next to them.
A calculator here, of course, leads to more work, not less. I bet the vast majority of the time that somebody too lazy or anxiety-ridden to learn how to calculate 20% in their head is also going to be too lazy and bothered to take out a calculator every time they need to know, rather than just trying to bluff their way through conversations until they can get to a calculator.
Calculators are of no benefit to students who have no clear concept of the calculation. Just learn your times tables, they're one of the first things we teach kids.
The pragmatic pro-calculator "nobody needs to calculate those numbers in real life" school I think gets most of its support because constructivists often fail entirely to teach things that have been until now best learned by rote, hoping that an instinct for multiplication and division will naturally and precisely arise from children's mathematical souls. The fact that it doesn't is proof that doing arithmetic is bad and a waste of time actually. They love abstractions, but only vague ones that can't be reliably tested.
> Either way, they probably would not likely have learned the mental math required to do this regardless of if it were being taught at school or not
That's the law of averages. It is not a law.
Compound interest is hard to do with mental math, but what you're actually seeing is a behavioral economics phenomenon called hyperbolic discounting.
I'm not sure where the line is, but there is a point where the abstraction works so well you really don't need to know how it works underneath.
I'm also not sure if a car mechanic needs to know how an engine works. I'm assuming almost none of them could design a car engine from scratch. They know just enough to know which parts needs to be replaced.
There is a point where most people might not need to know
There is never a point where no one needs to know
That's why, when your car has a problem, a lot of mechanics just blindly replace parts with the hope that something will fix it. You are much better off with a mechanic that understands how the car works. And you will save a lot of money.
Similarly we reach a point in coding where you don't really need to know how every API or language you use operates beneath the hood, you just need to be able to see where its broken.
In the US :-)
And those skills are entirely context dependent. You're likely saying this from a SW engineer's point of view. Whereas I've worked in teams with physicists and electrical engineers. When you're in a meeting, and there is a technical discussion, and everyone can calculate in their head the effects after integrating a well known function and how that will impact the physical system, while you have to pull out a calculator/computer, you'll be totally lost.
You can argue that you could be as productive as the others if you were given the time (e.g. doing this on your own at your own cubicle), but no one will give you that time in meetings.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/13jhckh/...
But I am older than many. :-)
Source?