AI Killed the Maths Brain

AI's takeover of jobs may come first for computer science.

- Leif Weatherby

ChatGPT was released 2 1/2 years ago, and we have been in a public panic ever since. Artificial intelligence (AI) can write in a way that passes for a human, creating fear that relying too heavily on machine-generated text will diminish our ability to read and write at a high level.

We've heard that the college essay is dead, and that an alarming number of students use AI tools to cheat their way through college.

This has the potential to undermine the future of jobs, education, and art all at once.

The Titanic is indeed headed towards the iceberg, but the largest problem—at least at the moment—is not the college essay, the novel, or the office memo. It's computer code. I realized this in 2024 when I was teaching a course on AI, language, and philosophy. When I asked my students how they use chatbots, one told me that whenever he has a spreadsheet full of data (such as results from a lab experiment or information collected from a survey), he was trained in high school to write a quick bit of code to parse and analyze that data.

But now, he told me, he just throws the spreadsheet into ChatGPT, which analyzes it more quickly and requires him to do almost nothing.

That's when it hit me: AI is just as much a challenge to numeracy—our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively—as it is to literacy.

In February, AI engineer Andrej Karpathy reported on social media platform X that he was engaged in a new form of software development he called "vibecoding." Using nothing more than a series of spoken prompts to a chatbot, he was conducting ad hoc experiments on data and said he would "barely even touch the keyboard." He said this allowed him to "forget that the code even exists," leaving the grunt work to the AI and simply directing from above.