A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

An older analog is calculators. My college intro to stats course didn't allow them. We did simple arithmetic by hand and looked up things like roots and logs in tables. I still have my copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922

I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic.

Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed.

Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.

What the surface level take about calculators misses is that the average person can't do arithmetic in their head because they don't need to, but they also don't pull out a calculator in the many times a day it would be useful, like at the grocery store. People make horrible decisions with everyday home economics math and are taken advantage of.

The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled. Which is much scarier.

Actually the experience with calculators portends a dismal future.

Before calculators, i.e. slide rules, log tables, hand arithmetic: by the time engineers completed their university education most could approximate relevant parameters in their work to +/- 5% or the actual value. Slide rules would give you a result to 3 (rarely 4) significant decimals, but you needed to know the expected result to within half an order of magnitude.

After calculators, many graduate engineers will accept erroneous results from their calculations without noticing orders of magnitude discrepencies.

We constantly hear of spreadsheet errors making their way into critical projects.

With AI the risk is that even currently levels of critical thinking will be eroded.

If we had stayed with slide rules, we'd probably be on mars and beyond by now. Household fusion reactors too.

I agree completely.

The amount of college educated people that do not now how to calculate a tip in their head is terrifying.

I can understand not being able to get 17.5% down to the penny. But 10%, 15% or 20% can be calculated in your head faster than I can get my phone out. This level of math is pretty basic.

Its also worth saying that I was never described as a "math person". The number of people that will blindly accept what the calculator tells them is too fucking high.

I have already noticed far too many people using chatGPT as a source. I have a tax attorney friend who got in an argument with an agent at the CRA (Canada Revenue) over whether her interpretation of a rule was correct or whether the chatGPT interpretation was correct. Mind you, she works as a prosecuting attorney so it wasn't adversarial, it was just her saying, "sorry, I'm the legal expert, this interpretation is incorrect, and we will lose if we use this interpretation".

Totally agree. The pessimist in me says that part of this is unavoidable. Our tools specialize so that we can direct our limited resources elsewhere, as a consequence of delegating those particular abilities atrophy in us.

Not being able to organize information, create a synthesis, or express yourself in less-likely-than-a-LLM terms is going to have detrimental effects. I think not only will it lead to insane, horse-blinder level, hyper specialization, but it will flatten entire segments of the human experience.

> We constantly hear of spreadsheet errors making their way into critical projects.

Are there any examples, i.e. spreadsheet mistakes in engineering projects that wouldn’t have happened if a slide rule was used? This sounds interesting.

I only know about spreadsheet errors in general, e.g. gene symbols being converted to dates[1]. Unless you meant that?

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37176926.amp

Working with computers I mentally use a hybrid of BCD and binary arithmetic. e.g. for the 17.5%, I mentally move the decimal point to the left, drop the cents, add half and then half of that, i.e. 10% + 5% + 2.5%