And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.

This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"

AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?

The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.

AI is here to stay. But learning to copy-paste homework into a chatbot is not really a skill one needs to learn.