I don't know where you went to school, but in my college I was allowed to use calculators on the math tests. I never did because I quickly realized the professors intentionally wrote problems such that doing math in my head would be easy. Those who used a calculator missed the important crutch of, 'oops, this math is getting hard - That must mean I'm making a mistake' and go back to fix the problem.

Physics and chemistry, dealing with real world constants that are often not particularly around easy numbers, you pretty much need a calculator in order to get anything close to a correct answer. But even then, the correct thing is to simplify without a calculator first before plugging the numbers in.

This is pretty much my perspective on the major problem represented by AI: cognitive atrophy.

I'm 40 something, masters degree, desk based professional consultant for 20 years now.

I don't really recall the content of the courses I studied at university, although they do come back to me with a little revision. What has stuck with me, is everything you just described: how to collate information and understand problems, and how to communicate. I've had 30 odd years of practice at doing that.

My point is, had I been using AI during that time, I would not have had that practice.

Math classes never allowed calculators, not because they were some sort of unfair advantage, but because if you somehow became reliant on it, it would hamper your ability to learn how to solve the problem.

I really don't get this logic. Calculators don't solve problems they do arithmetic and make it so you don't need to cry because you can't remember the fucking unit square and your masochist calc prof wants you to do trig operations without a calculator.

If you are learning to solve expressions, then sure it makes sense to limit calculator use. I still hate it because I did poorly in math until we stopped using numbers all together and then I ✨ thrived ✨.

Yes. That's what I was trying to communicate. They aren't using their brain to gain the critical thinking skills to figure shit out for themselves. If we think this is bad, oh just wait til the gen in kindergarten grow to college age without having to use a single braincell through their entire education. It's already happening and it's scary. Watching 11 year olds unwilling to figure anything out for themselves and instead either asking someone how to do something or just googling it... We're so screwed.

Because people don't ask, "How do I do a Fourier Transformation?" The say, "Do this math problem for me and show so the steps."

A half-wrong cheating tool can still be useful if you haven't done any studying at all.

AIs appear impressive because they're mostly right. That is: in many areas they'll "know" more about a topic than a random person, so to the novice they're really impressive.

It's just that being "better than the average person" at a task is still pretty shitty compared to someone who specializes in that task.

It's why so many CEOs find them impressive. Their results look good to the untrained.

Because people don't cheat to gain knowledge. They cheat to fulfill a societal norm (getting the diploma/certification etc) that says they "succeeded". Cheating is basically just taking a shortcut to an outcome without gaining the benefit of doing the actual work.

The usefulness of cheating in this scenario is that they can get the result the college requires without doing the work, and still receiving the benefit of achieving said result.

Because we don't generally explain to people why we school them and teach them specific things. We fail quite badly at expressing the why of learning specific skills and we have known that for awhile. AI just created a readily accessible shortcut for some to thinking because we don't and have basically never explained that a lot of school work is about teaching basic ideas and then developing skills to let people scale those ideas up using critical thinking and first principles. We are teaching people to think, not just to know.

Because it is very convincing. It generates great essays. The problem is that it has no way to evaluate truth.

Because they're confidently wrong.

It's still the fact that they need to be learning the HOW. There's nothing wrong with calculators at some point but not when you don't know how that calculator got the answer. It's the same for AI.

Like what models? I use Gemini PRO (whatever the highest paid version is) for work and have to fact check everything of importance.

Dumb stuff it's failed at: Here are two lists of a few hundred serial numbers, list all that are on both lists.

I'm trying to do X, how would I do that in X system? *Proceeds to tell me to click on things that don't exist.

I don't know that's a good assumption anymore. These students are probably the ones who had zoom from home "school" through formative years, with Chromebooks pushed on them before that. Schools were dropping handwriting from curriculum long before LLM/agentic forms of AI.

Heck, I was graduating high school around the time the first iPhones were coming out and I barely wrote. It was maybe 1-2 essays per school year max, not exactly enough for robust skill development. Exams were almost all multiple choice or 1-2 word short answers at most to make grading more efficient.