by sensanaty | 2025-09-05 09:15:10+00:00
The calculator example everyone keeps bringing up is such a massive misunderstanding of what the issue with LLMs is.

I did IGCSE/A-levels (International school following the British school system). For IGCSE, around grade 8 (if memory serves), you're allowed the use of calculators, including during all exams. For AS/A Levels (grades 11 and 12), you're also allowed calculators in all subjects that have any kind of mathematics at all, like Physics, Chemistry, Maths etc.

On the front page of the exam papers, you also get a list of all formulae that might be relevant. For physics this will be things like the formula for calculating Force, or all the ones relating to electricity, or gravity etc. Similarly for math, you'll get common formulae for even the simple things that everyone is expected to know like Pythagoras' theorem.

The thing is, the calculators and the formulae were of very little use to you if you didn't know the theory behind it in the first place. This same concept applies for the basics like arithmetic, if you yourself have never done arithmetic without the aid of a calculator, you can plug in all the numbers you want, but you don't have that intuition for what looks roughly right or not and you won't get very far. I still have memories of me punching in some numbers in the calculator, and then being confused by the resulting number, because for years I practiced my mental arithmetic and was at a state where I know that the number just looked different from what I was expecting.

The thing here is that the years studying arithmetic weren't only relevant for just the math class I was doing, it was universally useful whenever I interacted with any numbers, including in other subjects like Physics (where you're often working with incomprehensible numbers that end with an `^11`, so having an intuition for orders of magnitudes really mattered) or Chemistry (similarly except it's ^-11). Even for the less STEM-focused subjects like Business studies, having an intuition for basic Mathematics makes a huge difference.

LLMs/AIs in this context would be replacing all those foundation building years, for basically everything. You as the student relying on AI for everything will take a look at that exam sheet, take a look at that list of formulae and will have absolutely no clue what any of it means, because you haven't practiced any of it yourself. You'll see some number spat out by the calculator and it'll be negative when it should be positive, and the order of magnitude will be ^21 rather than ^11, and you'll lack the foundational knowledge to know intuitively that number is wrong and the answer is wrong. Except this will apply for everything that an LLM can answer, not just numbers.

We already live in a world where people take anything they read online as gospel. People already don't know how to read graphs, and have no intuition for numbers. If something is said in an authoritative-enough tone, many people will just go with it even if the data shows the opposite of what is being said. We now want to introduce hallucination machines and have the future generations be dependent on them and to outsource all their thinking to them? Even though it's hilariously easy to get these systems spitting out absolute nonsense, just in a confident and well-written tone?

> "Spellcheck removes the ability to spell"

This has factually happened. How many people out there do you see that don't know the difference between your and you're, or that constantly mispell [sic] common words? Whether that's something that is important is a different discussion, but it is a truth.

> "Typing text will destroy cursive and handwritten".

This has also objectively happened. Again, whether it's truly important or not is a different topic, but I can use myself as an example, I basically have a child's handwriting because I haven't really written anything since high school. I still have to write from time to time, for example when filling out some gov't forms, and it's a genuine pain in the ass sometimes how terrible my handwriting is.