Actually, they have for a large majority of the population. And fun fact: that debate is still going on, and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) enacted a rule prohibiting calculator use in AMC.

https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...

Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper...

I have heard stories of cashiers being incapable of giving correct change. So yes it has happened.

A more apt analogy is the diminishing understanding of assembly language and machine instruction sets. I love programming and something got lost in both transitions, first to high level languages and now to coding agents. I am quite sure some contexts will require programming by hand for a long while as there are still people who are writing amd64/avx512/sass by hand. I hope in time we will find new ways to enjoy solving problems with this new programming modality. By now, I am pretty sure it is here to stay and evolve from its current crude form.

Math skills had never anything to do with arithmetic. Maybe Ramanujan discovered a couple of theorems by dealing with numbers themselves. That is it.

Online discourse though is collapsing under dumb AI talking points.

Arithmetic skills. And they probably have?

Not really the same, since your average calculator doesn't take over executive function. The user thought and decided what needs to happen, down to one extremely well-specified task, which is so unambiguous that it can be completed by rote and without context.

This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework, generate answers, and maybe even submit them on your behalf. If that had been the (average) student experience, math skills really would have collapsed.

> And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.

People can no longer drive a stick-shift car, whereas it used to be that a valet would always be able to drive one to park it.

That's a very good point. People don't pull out their calculator in the grocery store to do analysis of unit costs or whatever, it's too much of a hassle for that small kind of analysis. But calculators have robbed us of the need to be good at doing that math in our heads. So the math doesn't get done.

This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened.

"Mental math skills" literally did collapse tho??? "Math skills" to write proofs (which a calculator cannot do) is a fundamentally different skill set than that "math skills" of mechanically doing arithmetic (which a calculator does do).

Seems like critical reading skills have already collapsed.

No.

With a calculator you still need to understand the fundamentals of mathematics. You also need to understand how to operate a calculator and know its functions.

Even when removing numbers and manual calculation, being a function or formula oriented mathematician still requires you to know the theory and functionality.

With an LLM, you don't even need to know anything other than asking the robot to perform. You don't understand the output, nor can an unskilled person explain it.

They probably have though.

This is the same kind of analogy people make when they "poo-pooh" any sort of technological advance, especially with AI.

"Oh, that old simple device didn't displace anything, so this one which is now quickly taking over every job will be just like that simple one". So I guess people today know how to sew and knit and bake bread?

"Oh, humans were always needed, so it'll be the same this time." Is that true of horses and oxen after cars and tractors were invented?

Your calculator isn’t designed to keep you addicted to it and doesn’t have baked in orders like “be humorous and irreverent when appropriate.”

Also, yes I am dependent on a calculator.

1) have they not? 2) not a level comparison