In order to develop the kinds of mental skills you need to tackle complex problems, you need to practice them on simpler problems first (particularly if you happen to be a child). If you decide at a young age it's worthless to attempt any problems that can be solved by a calculator or ChatGPT, you will probably never learn how to solve any problems that you can't use those tools for either.

Also, knowing what kind of things exist and what questions to ask is half the battle. If you haven't stored anything in your head on the grounds that you can outsource knowing things and thinking about them to ChatGPT, you're not going to be able to prompt it efficiently either. It's much harder to sanity check numbers and formulas given to you by others (or ChatGPT) if you can't do any quick mental math. Having original ideas that don't yet exist in LLM datasets also requires storing a lot of concepts and making new connections between them.

I suppose all this is moot if you expect AGI to be available to everyone in the near future, but if it turns out to be decades or more away unfortunately human mental effort will still be required in the meantime.

Not true. Current research is that experts are better with a ChatGTP, and beginners worse. An expert knows what to ask, and a beginner juat flails around.

Tools like calculators, ChatGTP, Google, and chainsaws are often force magnifiers for experts, and a danger for beginners.

If you have an idea of what you are trying to do at a deep level then they are great, but beginners don't, they usually just use them as a shortcut to avoid needing any real understanding of the space, and just get "the answer".

Although in some ways youre right. There will need to be changes in the skills we value, just churning out words, or calculating large sums and interating obscure trig functions will lose value.

>we all know now how wrong that was.

How wrong was it ? I find myself having to do head math every time I playing video games.

This is about building [math] skill, not simply calculating a result

(1) chatGTP is not a calculator. A calculator resolutely computes the exact numerical answer (modulo finite bits and rational numbers etc). ChatGTP is more stochastic. sometimes it's right, maybe a lot of the time, but no promises! (2) said student is taking an exam to find answers without the benefit of ChatGTP. Thusly doing exercises in a ChatGTP will not benefit the exam in the same way someone who only uses the calculator will suck at mental math. similar to what some of us may have seen "no calculators allowed on math exam"

but the big hangup is that "stochastically correct/incorrect" part. Can't count on it, still need skillz. Maybe when straberry/q* drops things will change in this regard

The same holds for calculators. My university banned graphical calculators from math courses. It is too easy to plug in a formula and see the graph. But for mathematical intuition, they want you know how formulas look like from your memory.

Mechanical aids—be they abacuses, slide rules, pocket calculators, supercomputers, or large language models—will never replace the need to reason.

Unless you can do the task yourself, you have a very hard time figuring out whether the LLM hallucinates or not. Relying on ChatGPT for your education is the path towards believing fake news.

Except you still have to validate ChatGPTs answer... Even answer keys in text books are sometimes wrong, teachers are sometimes wrong. ChatGPT is often wrong. You still need to learn the skills.