sigh… how can one be so dumb?
Nope, this is a common thought amongst those impressed by AI. And I can relate coz when I was in school, no one would give a good answer to why I needed to do any arithmetics without a calculator.
I think it’s reactionary, too. A version of “anything to trigger the libs”. If so many people weren’t against AI, OOP might have taken a moment to think before they type. As it stands, they reached for the first hot argument to get their opinion out. And I don’t mean to absolve them from anything here, just analyzing.
As a math teacher, my suggestion to the students is during practice to try to do calculations without a calculator to invoke a bit of number sense so when they use calculators be able to notice in the result if they did a wrong input. It happens to input “14” instead of “41” . I feel like able to do mental arithmetic with double digit numbers can be helpful
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation, and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical