alt Hacker NewsI remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.
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Calculators are cheap commodities. LLMs are owned by rent-seeking Napoleons, with debts bigger than the GDP of Norway. So they won't be cheap for very long.
You are making a grave mistaking here of thinking by analogy. Just because parents said something similar about something else long time ago has no bearing on the current situation.
Unfortunately people are inherently lazy. Curious and driven indivdiuals will excel with the availability of LLM's, but the majority will atrophy.
What larger problem can you do in a school setting with a calculator?
When doing algebra you need to be able to effortlessly do sums, multiplications, divisions, factorizations.
Meanwhile if you’re doing a physics or engineering calculation, it’s better to manipulate all the symbols algebraically and only plug in values at the final step.
I don’t see how a calculator is actually useful in driving learning outcomes.