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Jensen Huang says kids shouldn’t learn to code — they should leave it up to AI.::At the recent World Government Summit in Dubai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break with tech leader wisdom by saying that programming is no longer a vital skill due to the AI revolution.
Well, a lot of maths can be done with a calculator. They don’t need to learn to actually understand the maths unless either they actually want to, or they’re going into something like engineering.
I disagree. They need to understand math, but not being able to calculate math problems in their head.
Absolutely. The calculator is a tool to help you solve a problem. If you don’t understand the problem, then at best you can’t confirm if the answer is correct or not, and at worst the entire exercise is completely lost on you.
The same applies to LLMs. Sure you can get them to spit out code, but unless you understand the code it might be tough to verify that it does what you want. Further, if the code needs adapting (as it often does) then you are shit out of luck if you don’t understand it.
Sure you can ask the LLM to make changes, but the moment something goes wrong in the prompt you have an error sitting there polluting all future output.
As an autist i can it agree more, understanding something is a requirement for me to do well.
So much of my struggles in school where based on using formulas without knowing why or whats behind them, not understanding the broader practical implications and intended goals of assignments, i was just told to just do them, the way it is asked with the formulas i was given (or was forced to remember). Lost motivation, my will to live even, spiraled and crashed hard in the end.
I got better, now i am sitting here scribbling all kinds of math in my little black book as a way to relax. I dont watch “tv” but i wont miss a kurtzegesagt or a veritasium.
I inherently love science, in major contrast to my later high school grades.
Absolutely. If one just “does as told” without understanding without understanding there is no way of knowing if one is lost or not.
I’ve had similar experiences in school myself, and they truly are detrimental to both learning and the joy of learning.
I’m glad you are doing better, and thanks for sharing your story :)
This is objectively stupid. There are tonnes of things you learn in maths that are useful for everyday life even if you don’t do the actual calculations by hand.
In many engineering professions you really need to understand the underlying math to have a chance in hell to interpret the results correctly. Just because you get a result doesn’t mean you get an answer.
Scientific calculators can do a ton of stuff, but they’re all useless if you don’t know anything about math. If you don’t know anything about the subject, you can’t formulate the right questions.
And that’s why people don’t understand that I’m not magic. Seriously, no you should know how to do math, understand how it works. Just like how as an engineer I need to understand how stories work.
They aren’t going to catch the typo or order of operations error they made on their calculator if they don’t understand the math
You need to learn what is addition subtraction multiplication division and also how it works to do anything meaningful with it in calculator…