Writing atrophied our memory, calculators atrohpied our mental arithmetic, GPS nagivation atrophied our navigation ability, LLMs are atrophying our ability to program.
replyWhen you externalise part of your brain in a new tool, like a calculator, that part of your brain is no longer needed and atrophies.
If the complexity of your mathematical problems was down to arithmetic then your problems were not at all complex.
replyA small example is doing NPV (Net Present Value) calculations to compare the benefits from alternative projects/investments. It's just basic arithmetic, but is annoying to do by hand. I'm sure that if we had to do them with just pen and paper, we would do significantly fewer of them, and with a lot less detailed scenarios than we can with tools.
replya lot of people indeed cannot do even simple calculations by themselves. Your example just adds to the point.
reply"A lot of people" never could do simple calculations, regardless of calculators. But if you're interested in actual figures over time, this data from nationsreportcard.gov would probably be the best longitudinal data source we have about the US, showing a strong general increase in mathematical scores, both for 9 and 13 year-olds, from when calculators started being introduced in the 70s and until the 2010s. Note that there's a recent decline over the last decade, partially explained by the pandemic, but even with it, current scores are higher than what they were in the 70s.
replyhttps://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...