Calculators have made most people a lot worse in arithmetic. Many people, for instance, don't even grasp what a "30%" discount is. I mean other than "it's a discount" and "it's a bigger discount than 20% and lower than 40%". I have seen examples where people don't grasp that 30% is roughly one third. It's just a discount, they trust it.
GPS navigation has made most people a lot worse at reading maps or generally knowing where they are. I have multiple examples where I would say something like "well we need to go west, it's late in the day so the sun will show us west" and people would just not believe me. Or where someone would follow their GPS on their smartphone around a building to come back 10m behind where they started, without even realising that the GPS was making them walk the long way around the building.
Not sure the calculator is a good example to say "tools don't make people worse with the core knowledge".
Before, you had the map. So you were aware that Fitzroy was to the west of Collingwood and both were south of Clifton Hill and so on. I had dozens of these suburbs roughly mapped out in my mind.
Driving down an unfamiliar road, one could use signs to these suburbs as a guide. I might not know exactly where I was, but I had enough of an idea to point me in the right direction.
That skill has disappeared.
>Driving down an unfamiliar road, one could use signs to these suburbs as a guide. I might not know exactly where I was, but I had enough of an idea to point me in the right direction.
Reading those sentences feels like I am dreaming. The exploration... The possibilities... Serendipitously finding you way through and getting temporarily lost at night in a big friendly suburban area with trees and in summer...
This is especially true because the general past alternative to using GPS to find some new unfamiliar place wasn't "read a map" it was "don't go there in favor of going some place you already knew" in a lot of cases. I remember the pre-GPS era, and my experience in finding new stuff is significantly better today than it was back then.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0
If you habitually use a calculator for all arithmetic, could the result not be similar? What if you reach to an LLM for all your coding, general research, etc.? These tools may vastly speed up some workflows, but your brain is a muscle.
And you answer by saying "it's okay to be less knowledgeable (and hence depend on the tool), as long as you are more productive". Which is a different question.
But to me it's obviously not desirable: if AI allows people to completely lose all sense of critical thinking, I think it's extremely dangerous. Because whoever controls the AI controls those people. And right now, look at the techbros who control the AIs.
So the original question is: is it the case that AI reduces the skills of the people who use them? The calculator and the GPS are examples given to suggest that it doesn't sound unlikely.
So GPS makes people worse at orienteering -- on average, does it get everyone where they need to go, better / faster / easier?
Sometimes, the answer is admittedly no. Google + Facebook + TikTok certainly made us less informed when they cannibalized reporting (news media origination) without creating a replacement.
But on average, I'd say calculators did make the population more mathematically productive.
After all, lots of people sucked at math before them too.
A calculator doesn't do maths, it does arithmetic. People sucked at maths, but I'm pretty sure they were better with arithmetic.
> At the end of the day, it's the average productivity across a population that matters.
You're pushing my example. My point is that AI may actually make the average developer worse. Sure, also more productive. So it will reinforce this trend that has been in the software industry for more than a decade: produce more but worse software.
Productivity explains why we do it. It doesn't mean it is desirable.
I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.
It's easily possible for an organization to be more productive with worse developers because of the tools they have access to.
And no, that's not some slight of verbal hand in measuring "productive" -- they are able to ship more value, faster.
That’s not clear to me at all.
Arithmetic is a subset of maths.
I mean it’s not the end of the world and as you’ve said the raw number of people of numerate people are rising thanks to technology. But technology also seem to rob people of motivation to learn somewhat useful skills and even more so with LLMs.
This is not actually possible.
> Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?
Which doesn't make much sense, because a calculator doesn't do maths. So I answered the question that does make sense: if everyone uses a calculator, do we still learn arithmetic? And I believe we don't.
And then, if we suck at basic arithmetic, it makes it harder to be good at maths.
I suspect there will be plenty of people who grow up in the age of LLMs and maybe by reading so much generated code, or just coding things themselves for practice, will not have a hard time learning solid coding skills. It may be easy to generate slop, but it’s also easy to access high quality guidance.
