Right, I've seen a lot of facile comparisons to calculators.

It may be true that a cohort of teachers were wrong (on more than one level) when they chastised students with "you need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator"... However calculators have some essential qualities which LLM's don't, and if calculators lacked those qualities we wouldn't be using them the way we do.

In particular, being able to trust (and verify) that it'll do a well-defined, predictable, and repeatable task that can be wrapped into a strong abstraction.