Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness Okay. Let’s revisit this in five years. In the meantime, let’s not experiment on our kids.
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.
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.