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We also have people who need a tip calculator to calculate 20% of a check and people who can't spell without spell check.
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> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator.

I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equilibrium where it takes the same effort to take out the calculator and focus on typing, as it would to strain the brain doing it without a calculator.

> We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.

When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.

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I would also argue, that most school system forbid the usage of a calculator the first couple of years (at least that's how it was Germany a few decades ago). The same with writing per hand. You can spell check by looking the word up and then manually correcting it.

Both require manual "labor" which leads to learning.

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And calculators took decades to become widespread. So we could learn of their side effects before they became mainstream.

Also to note. Calculators merely solve intermediary steps. LLMs are increasingly designed to do a one shot full blown work. Longer context, deep thinking, agentic loops.

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No. These tools are very good at creating illusion of learning, without any learning. When you watch them do stuff, you think, yeah I got this. Once they are gone, you realize all your supposed skill is gone too. Getting a skill requires deliberate practice. You can use AI for that, but just using AI is not that.
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Why no? It sounds like you agree with the person you replied to
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There's an old Latin proverb "Scribere bis legere", which translates to "writing is reading twice".

In practice, what this means is that you can read some subject many times, but you would still struggle to reproduce the content by yourself. That is why, when learning, it is not sufficient to just read the material several times.

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It is kind of embarrasing but I feel worse at arithmetic than I ever was thanks to calculator reliance. I used to be able to do all sorts of complicated division and multiplication in my head. Exponents, whatever. Now it is like I have a disability. I feel like a first grader. What is 6738 / 37? I got to reach for a calculator now but in 6th grade that would have been a moment with a scrap of paper. Not sure I can even do long division on paper anymore. I can’t be alone with this.
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Those are inappropriate examples because they are all deterministic. The whole reason behind the AI movement is the move from deterministic processes, and exact descriptions, to handwavy descriptions and stochastic processes.

Of course there are people who do maths after the introduction of the calculator Just like there are more people who program after the introduction of the electronic computer.

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Why is it always so consistently a comparison to a technology of a fundamentally different order? Perhaps what has been lost is the ability to recognise distinct and incommensurable categories.
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Yes but currently I don't know of a single company in my area that doesn't make you use AI daily because of the supposedly increased productivity. That means that juniors also absolutely have to use AI, probably sabotaging their learning process in the long run.
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> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator.

Arithmetics is a very, very small subset of math.

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