Ah the calculator, the strawman of every maths teacher.
And yet, are we worse at math than the previous generations? I'm not so sure. Pretty quickly math becomes toying with letters and not numbers, and unless the calculator has an algebraic engine, it won't help you.
We can focus in more important aspects of math, like actually understanding the concepts. However, to me this will be worse than the calculator: LLM pretend to understand the problem, and can offer solutions. On the other hand, you don't get a calculator with a CAS until late university (if you ever get one). Calculators don't pretend to be more than what they are.
But IMHO we'll still get the benefits of calculators: let the humans focus on the difficult tasks. I don't want to write the full API scaffolding for the tenth time. I don't want to write the boilerplate for that test framework for the 15th time. LLMs are good at those tasks, let them do it!
And yet, are we worse at math than the previous generations? I'm not so sure. Pretty quickly math becomes toying with letters and not numbers, and unless the calculator has an algebraic engine, it won't help you.
We can focus in more important aspects of math, like actually understanding the concepts. However, to me this will be worse than the calculator: LLM pretend to understand the problem, and can offer solutions. On the other hand, you don't get a calculator with a CAS until late university (if you ever get one). Calculators don't pretend to be more than what they are.
But IMHO we'll still get the benefits of calculators: let the humans focus on the difficult tasks. I don't want to write the full API scaffolding for the tenth time. I don't want to write the boilerplate for that test framework for the 15th time. LLMs are good at those tasks, let them do it!