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...

[M Kehoe]

+1

5.56mm

[KC_Conspirator]

Correct. Liberals ruining skools paved the path.

[CaptainK]

Prior to AI, the NY Times killed the liberal brain.

[RoosterRedux]

Bfl

[RoosterRedux]

Bfl

[RoosterRedux]

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

That presumes that people decide to stop thinking.

A person using a calculator still has to understand precisely what he wants the calculator to do. The calculator is like a tractor to a farmer. The farmer still has to understand exactly what has to be done—what seeds to plant, what fertilizer to use, how much water is required.

The tool removes tedium. It provides leverage.

When a person uses AI to produce code, precise instructions are still required and the code has to be debugged and tested carefully. That's leverage, not the removal of critical thinking.

BTW, people who use computers for mathematical modeling, or engineering, or accounting, or statistics are not mentally lazier than people who don't use computers. They are always significantly more intellectually robust. Computers requires more rigor, not less.

[RoosterRedux]

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.

This is a ridiculous statement.

If you cheat in college or in any school, the only person you are cheating is yourself. When I was in college, I used to audit courses from time to time. So did my friends who were in college to learn. You didn't take tests when you audited courses. The professors would somtimes provide you with the exam questions if you wanted to test yourself, but he wouldn't grade them.

The purpose was learning.

Mentally lazy people will cheat. But people who cheat are already lost. They have failed before the game even starts.

[napscoordinator]

Even worse is Alexa because you don’t even have to type.

[Wuli]

The brain is dumb and as untrained as a muscle that never got exercised, until the brain is trained to use its neural networks to perform tasks that are put to it. Not tasked to do certain things the brain is hard pressed to address a mental task put to it and the person says, particularly in math and logic - “I don’t know”. I am not better at math because my brain is better at math. I am better at math because a few great teachers and I imposed more and more difficult mathematical tasks for the brain to do. In the analogy of a well exercised muscle the brain got stronger.

If people no longer know how to judge an A.I. result, as simple as with math, A.I. becomes more than a “tool”, it is a brain for its human robot it feeds instructions to.

[dfwgator]

The key still now is understanding just what problem you’re trying to solve.

[RoosterRedux]

I’m not sure I follow everything you’re saying, but I definitely agree with your “brain as a muscle” metaphor. I love math and still start my day with brainteasers. If I skip a few days, I can feel the difference—my thinking gets sluggish.

As for AI: if a person stops using it as a tool and starts letting it do their thinking for them, they’re basically surrendering their brain. Will that happen on a large scale? I don’t know. I’d like to believe some people will resist the temptation to become slaves.

[Moltke]

2 + 2 = 5 — for large values of “2”. (Old math joke)