A.I. Killed the Math Brain

The New York Times ^ | June 2, 2025 | Leif Weatherby

[E. Pluribus Unum]

ChatGPT was released two and a half years ago, and we have been in a public panic ever since. Artificial intelligence can write in a way that passes for human, creating a fear that relying too heavily on machine-generated text will diminish our ability to read and write at a high level. We’ve heard that the college essay is dead, and that alarming number of students use A.I. tools to cheat their way through college. This has the potential to undermine the future of jobs, education and art all at once.

The Titanic is indeed headed toward the iceberg, but the largest problem — at least at the moment — is not the college essay, the novel or the office memo. It’s computer code. I realized this last year when I was teaching a course on A.I., language and philosophy. When I asked my students how they use chatbots, one told me that whenever he has a spreadsheet full of data (such as results from a lab experiment or information collected from a survey), he was trained in high school to write a quick bit of code to parse and analyze that data. But now, he told me, he just throws the spreadsheet into ChatGPT, which analyzes it more quickly and requires him to do almost nothing.

That’s when it hit me: A.I. is just as much a challenge to numeracy — our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively — as it is to literacy.

In February, the A.I. engineer Andrej Karpathy reported on X that he was engaged in a new form of software development he called...

[Wuli]

Massive use of A.I. will gradually kill the mental exercises from which humans develop all manner of critical thinking.

[BobL]

“A.I. Killed the Math Brain”

Actually, Public Schools beat them to that goal.

[Openurmind]

“Massive use of A.I. will gradually kill the mental exercises from which humans develop all manner of critical thinking”

No way out of that reality.

[Ge0ffrey]

We’re doomed.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

It’s racist anyway, so good riddance! 🤡

[packagingguy]

I posed the question to Gemini that when I ask it chemistry questions I understand what I am asking and I understand the response.

Then I said if I went into a subject I knew nothing about (law was the example) I wouldn’t know what questions to ask and I’d never understand all the legalese in its answer.

It responded that it was a tool, much like construction tools. You have to know how to use it as it was simply an assistant. If you don’t know how to say, use a backhoe then you’ll likely create a disaster if you try fooling with it.

[Openurmind]

Thank you for posting this. I’m not sure folks realize how dangerous this really is. Humans are going to mentally go backward to primitive man from dependence on AI.

[plain talk]

This AI vs man debate becomes sort of moot at some point when man is able to interface their brains to computers. I doubt I will see it but wish them well.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Search engines already destroyed our memory recall ability.

[BlueLancer]

I have to mention this short story by Asimov ... foretelling this exact situation:

The Feeling of Power - Isaac Asimov

A short story by Isaac Asimov exploring the potential for both good and destructive applications of knowledge in a future where humans have become reliant on computers. The story revolves around a low-grade Technician, Myron Aub, who discovers the fundamentals of pencil-and-paper arithmetic, a skill humanity has largely forgotten. Aub's discovery, dubbed "Graphitics," is initially seen as a way to understand and potentially improve old computer systems, but is quickly appropriated by the military for their own purposes.

[Waverunner]

Read this in the 60's...

Why spend 20 yrs studying math if you can use a tool to solve a problem?
It's like the difference between cooking on an open fire versus using a modern oven with a temperature probe.
Tools are skill levelers and enhancers if you learn how to use them.
Unless your a professor teaching the skill for 1000.00 a credit hour.
Otherwise, adapt, incorporate, improvise, improve.
Same argument was used against calculators in the 70's.
The smart students bought programmable hp's and learned to reduce the time it took to solve problems.

[jonsie]

Amen!

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Who needs to understand anything anyway?

[_Jim]

re: “Search engines already destroyed our memory recall ability.”

I’d say I use search engines to augment, sometimes correct mine ... if I recall enough to jot down three or four terms on an obscure subject I briefly looked at in the past a search engine can usually ‘vector’ me towards what exactly it was I faintly recalled.

Take “CALEA” for instance, an act of congress passed back in the WJBC years concerning wireless wiretap procedures, and now CALEA is used for a company or product name, but search results for the Law Enforcement act are also referred to as well by a search engine.

[Valpal1]

Came here to say this.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I do the same thing, but the more I do it the more I have to do it.

[Openurmind]

“It’s like the difference between cooking on an open fire versus using a modern oven with a temperature probe.”

One requires a power infrastructure the other does not.

[texas booster]

How about mental arithmetic?

Just teaching my granddaughters the number tables and simple ways to add and subtract have put them grade levels above their peers.

Just waiting for when they decide that grandpa is an old has-been.

[glorgau]

Many of the AI models will tell you that 9.1 > 9.11