I'm not talking about future capabilities, I'm saying it will cease to be arguable within 5 years. We can't just bury our heads in the sand. Kids are going to need to engage with this directly, and it cannot wait until after they graduate high school. I'm not saying give up doing things by hand, but also everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math. It's not one or the other, it has to be both.

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ben_w a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm not saying give up doing things by hand, but also everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math.

I started secondary school (British closest equivalent to highschool) in autumn 1995. One of the teachers opined that they liked Apple's computers "but no point teaching them because they'd be bankrupt soon". Took a while for the school to replace the RISC OS machines with Windows.

By 2000, when I started my A-levels (UK has two years between secondary school and university for this qualification), Windows and MacOS had changed so much as to make any lessons from the start of secondary school, on RISC OS, irrelevant.

Five years later, 2005/06, I noticed while using my laptop to record my final year of university lectures (I was on a four year course), that most of us in the lecture hall had gone from pen and paper in the first year to laptops in the final year.

Five more, 2010, smartphones had no mice, and the on-screen keyboards were significantly different from physical keyboards. Multitasking was a very different experience compared to a desktop or laptop OS. Social media was replacing "never tell anyone on the internet your real name" with "tell everyone on the internet even the most banal details about your life".

Five more, 2015, and smartphones and apps were shifting from exceptions to expectations.

Five more, 2020, we're walking into rooms and telling the always-listening microphone to adjust the lights or play some music, and using the now-free video calls we'd come to expect as a minimum requirement of any chat service to get us through the isolation of the pandemic.

Two years later, 2022, people started cheating on their homework with an AI which knew more than they did, even despite how bad early AI was at maths in particular.

Four years later, 2026, the AI isn't just helping kids cheat, it is solving (a limited subset of) previously unsolved maths problems at research level.

Even last year, 2025, when it was "merely" doing well on Olympiad-type challenges, I didn't even understand the questions. My A-levels included maths and further maths, which isn't a boast because I didn't follow this up with a maths degree, but it should give a sense of how much further ahead of mandatory schooling AI already was even last year.

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We can't just bury our heads in the sand. Kids are going to need to engage with this

This was the same argument made for smartphones in schools.

> it cannot wait until after they graduate high school

I have a strong opinion about technology in early education. The evidence is more mixed for high-school students—I don’t have a view there.

If the argument is no AI in elementary or middle school, and controller introduction in high school, I could get on board with that as long as the solution is being developed by the state and not one of the AI companies or tech giants.

> everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math

Most people don’t need to know advanced math. Our problem, currently, is college students being unable to do basic math. Or hold attention through a book.

> it has to be both

Why? AI isn’t a mature technology. I’m not convinced someone who was chatting with ChatGPT in 2023 is more productive with AI, today, than someone who started building agentic workflows into their processes six months ago.

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pj_mukh 3 days ago | parent [-]

>>solution is being developed by the state

I'm curious, how do you envision this development happening? You're (presumably) calling for all school boards to ban any AI developed anything in classrooms like NY just did.

Are you expecting public universities to perhaps carry out studies first?

For reference, I think putting a tablet with an AI in front of kids to talk to is a silly boogeyman most people seem to be talking about in this thread. My vision was always teacher tooling that would greatly expand the teachers ability to develop individualized curriculum and test a kids progress in a classroom etc. But calling for such blanket bans means we can't even test any of this..anywhere.

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> how do you envision this development happening?

Idk. I don’t have a great solution. But I also don’t think kids being slightly less familiar with AI at schools is a real problem.

> how do you envision this development happening?

Literally two classrooms I’ve seen in the Bronx in the last 6 months. Tablets are cheaper than teachers.

> My vision was always teacher tooling

I like this. I support it. I don’t support putting it in front of kids. Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent.

> calling for such blanket bans means we can't even test any of this

No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies.

	▲	pj_mukh 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>> Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent. None of the headline grabbing CEO's have any official education relationships. This seems like a "I saw some bad headlines" vibey reaction. >>No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies. Not in schools we can't, where Teacher productivity has slumped. Teachers are spending more time doing admin work, and less time with kids. Meanwhile, rich parents who send their kids to Private schools can experiment ASAP (this ban doesn't affect them), and get any and all productivity enhancements. Shouldn't the government be creating some space for experimentation? Shouldn't it be the onus of the banning party to create this space?

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>I'm not talking about future capabilities, I'm saying it will cease to be arguable within 5 years

So... talking about future capabilities.

>Kids are going to need to engage with this directly

Just to get this straight: are you the kind of person to give your 1st grader a calculator and say "just use this. you won't ever have to add numbers by hand anyway"? So much metaphors of AI go around calculators, but this is a problems we solved decades ago.

>everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math

We have so much complaints over the application of math as is. Now you're arguing that it's useful again because we can offload it to an AI?

	▲	lukeschlather a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Just to get this straight: are you the kind of person to give your 1st grader a calculator I think banning smartphone/computer use before 3rd grade in the classroom sounds like a good idea. Math is incredibly useful. I think the biggest problem with math is that people don't understand how to apply it, it's not that applications are hard to find. AI actually explains how to apply it very directly. I can never remember how to calculate compound interest, an AI can do it instantly. Mamdani's banning teachers from using AI to grade assignments. > So... talking about future capabilities. No, I'm talking about current capabilities. The studies that prove that current AI is better at grading assignments than humans will take at least a year, if not several. The question is if we change what assignments teachers give, or if we accept that grading is a task best done by computers. If we change the assignments that teachers give, I don't know what that looks like. Regardless, there's going to be a lot of experimentation going on. Banning AI doesn't help.