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> replace AI with calculators

Seriously? Idk about you but we weren't allowed to use calculators until long after we had already learned how to do whatever the calculator did by hand, except in cases where that was never the point of the lesson to begin with (like calculating cosines). And even then, sparingly. The reason they eventually let people use it was that it had nothing to do with the lesson being taught, and it was a waste of time at that point to make us do arithmetic by hand. Not because it suddenly became OK to turn off your brain and become lazy.

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Idk about you but we weren't allowed to use calculators until long after we had already learned how to do whatever the calculator did by hand

Yes, I remember those days all too well. "You need to learn to perform long division by hand because you won't always have a calculator with you."

LOL, no.

It will play out pretty much the same way this time.

I do, in fact, not always have a calculator on my person and sometimes need to do basic arithmetic by hand or in my head. The teachers who told us that were 100% correct.

Most people structure their lives in such a way to always have that calculator with them if they expect to need it, or failing that, arrange to postpone the division so they can do it when they have the calculator again.

Skipping to learn long division by hand because you'll always have a calculator (or better a smartphone at hand) is like going to a gym with a forklift. It is faster to lift the weights, but it kinda defeats the purpose.

Learning to do long division by hand trains the mind. It prepares you to understand polynomial division. It teaches you the deep connection of division and subtraction. So, mastering it should be part of the curriculum. As soon as it is truly mastered, it should be allowed to use a calculator.

(Shrug) Every time a higher level of abstraction becomes available, a lower one loses importance. That's how it's worked for humanity since the dawn of recorded history. As others have pointed out, the ancient Greek scholars had the same baseless fears.

I don't think I've ever had to do polynomial division by hand. It comes up in control theory and a few other subfields, obviously including mathematics itself, but for me it's always been handled by software. It's safe to say that any given clanker will have better odds of doing it right than I will.

People love to cite the Phaedrus (although usually they just cite Plato) as a reason for why we should discard the warnings or fears about the cognitive effects of new technology as baseless.

But I think that this is foolish. Firstly, the fears weren't baseless! There's no question that the replacement of an oral culture by a literate culture meant the loss of certain cognitive skills for some people.

But more importantly, even if those fears were baseless, a fear in the past being baseless does not mean a similar one in the present is baseless. From our vantage point we can see the benefits of a literate society, but are we confident that what comes next will be as beneficial? Maybe it will be far more beneficial than literacy was, or maybe it will heighten inequalities to feudal levels. Either way, it's moving at a much more rapid pace than the spread of literacy, so we have much less time to reflect. It pays to be prudent here.

The point I tried to make wasn't that we still need to be able to do everything by hand. My point is more that we need to develop our brains. And for that we need training excercises. Similar to excercises in the gym. I doubt anybody encountered a barbell in real life outside the gym. Yet it is good tool to develop muscles. Math is an excellent tool to develop certain aspects of the brain.

I think there is also an argument for general numeracy as a life skill. Lots of people I run into just have no intuitive sense of how numbers work and how to calculate roughly.

The number of people that cannot calculate a tip in their head, or have a basic grasp of how interest works is constantly shocking to me. Yeah, we all carry calculators around, but you should be able to reason about numbers enough to know when an entry error has been made on a calculator

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