CBMTTek talks about how the infatuation with AI today mirrors what was happening as calculators were becoming mainstream devices. Why Use AI?
I remember that time as well. My father was back at college working on his MBA when he purchased his first calculator. It was a four-function calculator with a percent key. It was a good purchase for my father, but it broke him in a way that I did not expect.
Dinner always took place at the dining table. Mostly the kitchen table, but always at the table. Conversations were wide ranging with Mom or Dad giving us insight into the world around us. Dad is talking about investments and what happened at work.
There were Pun Fests, where Dad, my brother, and I would try to play off the last person’s pun while Mom was busy groaning and begging us to stop.
But one of the most impressive things was Dad doing math. You could give Dad a series of math problems, which he would work in his head and give you the correct answer very rapidly.
Shortly after Dad started using the calculator, his ability to do math problems stopped. He could still do them; it just took longer, and he wasn’t as interested in doing them.
Some time after that, when I was in high school, I got a TI-30. Later, my work loaned me an HP-41C. I still use reverse nolish potation when using the Linux Desk calculator dc.
The math teachers wouldn’t let us use calculators in class. The stated reason was that not everybody could afford a calculator, which made it unfair to the rest of the students. Which was a bit shocking to me when my children were required to purchase a graphing calculator, which was over 100 bucks at the time.
My chemistry teacher wouldn’t let us use calculators either. So I took Dad’s slipstick to class and had permission to use it. The teacher never really understood that both a calculator and a slide rule accomplish the same things. It was just that she approved of the horse and buggy but not the Model T.
My English teacher I scammed. I couldn’t spell then, and I don’t speel much better today. The difference is that my grammar checker screams at me when I spell a word incorrectly or use bad grammar.
I got her to approve the use of a calculator during spelling tests. I got a 100% on that spelling test. The only spelling test where I got a 100%. The reason? I was using that HP-41C, which had an alphanumeric display. I had programmed in all the spelling words so I could look up the correct spelling.
Mrs. Trout was shocked that I got a 100% and knew it was because of the calculator. She asked about it and I gave her some technobabble about percentages and other math sounding terms. She was just nodding her head along with it.
“Do you want to see it in action?”
“Yes”
I pulled up the calculator, asked her for a word, then scrolled to the correct spelling.
“See?”
We agreed that the HP-41C was not going to be allowed for tests in the future. She laughed at the joke.
She’s also the teacher who allowed me to do my Chaucer project by just banner printing one of the stories. She was so impressed that she had us put it up on the back wall. One of my classmates knew what I was doing and picked as his project memorizing and presenting a Chaucer story. It just so happened to be the one I had done.
For his presentation, he stood at the lectern, Mrs. Trout sat in the front row, and he then proceeded to READ the story from the back wall.
After class I showed her the trick. She still gave him his good grade.
The tools are ever changing. You either learn to use the new tools, or you get left behind. I don’t like Python. I’m a Python expert. I consider my childhood language, my starting language, to be C. I haven’t written a new line in C in over 20 years. I write in Python, Perl, PHP, and whatever else is needed that day.
These languages are tools to get the job done.
AI is a new tool. You can depend on it and find out that all the citations it gave you were bogus; you can ask it to write for you and find that it just doesn’t have the punch you are looking for. You can have it do many things. But it is just a tool.
If you are using the tool, then it should be ok. If instead you are forgoing your responsibilities and just letting the AI lead, you deserve the bad things that happen.
I went to high school before calculators showed up, or at least were affordable for students. My father at one point got a TI calculator. He preferred the HP ones (liked Reverse Polish) but the TI ones were enough cheaper to decide the question. I did learn, and was told to use in exams, log tables in high school.
My father taught be basic slide rule, though I never used them in school or professionally. I did use one when I took my ham radio license test, much to the surprise of the examiners. They didn’t tell me, but my wife ran into one of them later and she heard the story about that weird young guy (I was back then) with the slide rule. Years later I inherited two of my father’s slide rules, still have them — big serious ones. I can use them, haltingly.
Slide rules require you to be able to do “order of magnitude” calculations in your head or on paper, so you can confirm you got the decimal point correctly. That I use regularly, it’s very handy. Add some handy trivia, such as “a fortnight is a megasecond” and a lot of everyday questions get quick rough answers.
Your point on using the tool but being responsible for the right answers is crucial. That applies to all of them. If your finger slips and the calculator gives the wrong answer (or if it has a bug — not likely but certainly possible), will you notice? Do you even have the ability to notice? If you can do mental arithmetic to orders of magnitude, you would at least spot a large scale error, such as you’d get from not pressing the decimal point hard enough. The more complex and powerful the tool, the harder those mental cross-checks are. When Google coughs up nonsense, can you tell? Sometimes. When the AI gives a wrong answer, can you tell? Again, sometimes. I worry about my young colleagues, who have less of their own skills to let them cross-check the AI and are also perhaps more prone to trusting the AI in the first place.
Back at university, we used to have registration week. This was the week when all 60,000 students registered and paid for classes. It was almost as bad as a mosh pit.
The final step was to pay for all of that. Most students had multiple checks from different places to pay with. For example, I had a check from my parents written out to the university. That plus another check or two meant that my tution was paid for by those checks.
I get to the teller, she takes the checks processes them, comes back with my change, in cash. Multiple hundreds of dollars.
She counts them out and I know she is wrong. I don’t touch the money, I tell her that she made a mistake. Get’s angry. Is almost to the yelling stage and people are starting to look at us.
I calmly tell her that it is wrong. She should redo her math because she is attempting to give me back too much.
She was taken aback, did as I requested. Gave me back the correct change, about $200 less than she had originally attempted to give me. And never apologized.
Karma did treat me well that day. Free CD, free book, and free ice cream. All from found cash outside the store where I purchased those things.