If your kid genuinely enjoys those things, you should teach them math and CS anyway so that they have a shot at being one of the people designing the AI or supervising it to discover new math. LLMs have broad but shallow knowledge and can brute-force certain well defined tasks but the holes in their capabilities become very apparent once you go beyond undergraduate level studies.
The uproar you see on HN is because most developers are web front-end or back-end developers and LLMs do especially well at those tasks because they have a lot of training data to work with and also because there are also a lot of influencers, snake-oil peddlers, and doomsayers trying to hype AI up for their own gain.
In university, we had pretty powerful calculators. Mine had a "solve" button. We could bring them in our exams, but we were tested on figuring out what to ask the calculator. You needed to understand the topic well enough to tell that your result was off by an order of magnitude.
Humanities is also worth it, if only because it makes life so much more interesting. However it's not one of those things that can be forced upon someone. I hated a lot of it until I got to enjoy it on my own, without pressure.
I am not a parent, and I have no skin in this game, but I think that the future will still have space for a well-rounded human being. Even with all the fancy new tech, your child will still need to fix flat tires, negotiate, navigate ethical conflicts, cook, communicate with other people, apologise, speak up, and all the other things.
I don't think there is an alternate. Math and logics are mandatory for everything, not just CS. I'd teach Math, Science (Phys and Chem, biased towards history and experiments), Native Language (reading/writing/making speeches), History, one foreign language (mostly speaking but also some reading), Survival skills. Then I'll follow his interests to teach him something else.
I think the ^ are the minimum a good citizen needs. If you can't teach all of them maybe let him go to school as well, or hire someone to do the part you can't.
Regarding the future, yeah I share the some worry, but I guess we all have to go through it.
Calculators been able to do math for decades, we still teach math. It’s important to know enough to know when the calculator or AI are wrong, because the input was bad.
It also takes foundational knowledge to know what to type into a calculator or LLM.
If your kid genuinely enjoys those things, you should teach them math and CS anyway so that they have a shot at being one of the people designing the AI or supervising it to discover new math. LLMs have broad but shallow knowledge and can brute-force certain well defined tasks but the holes in their capabilities become very apparent once you go beyond undergraduate level studies.
The uproar you see on HN is because most developers are web front-end or back-end developers and LLMs do especially well at those tasks because they have a lot of training data to work with and also because there are also a lot of influencers, snake-oil peddlers, and doomsayers trying to hype AI up for their own gain.
In university, we had pretty powerful calculators. Mine had a "solve" button. We could bring them in our exams, but we were tested on figuring out what to ask the calculator. You needed to understand the topic well enough to tell that your result was off by an order of magnitude.
Humanities is also worth it, if only because it makes life so much more interesting. However it's not one of those things that can be forced upon someone. I hated a lot of it until I got to enjoy it on my own, without pressure.
I am not a parent, and I have no skin in this game, but I think that the future will still have space for a well-rounded human being. Even with all the fancy new tech, your child will still need to fix flat tires, negotiate, navigate ethical conflicts, cook, communicate with other people, apologise, speak up, and all the other things.
I don't think there is an alternate. Math and logics are mandatory for everything, not just CS. I'd teach Math, Science (Phys and Chem, biased towards history and experiments), Native Language (reading/writing/making speeches), History, one foreign language (mostly speaking but also some reading), Survival skills. Then I'll follow his interests to teach him something else.
I think the ^ are the minimum a good citizen needs. If you can't teach all of them maybe let him go to school as well, or hire someone to do the part you can't.
Regarding the future, yeah I share the some worry, but I guess we all have to go through it.
Calculators been able to do math for decades, we still teach math. It’s important to know enough to know when the calculator or AI are wrong, because the input was bad.
It also takes foundational knowledge to know what to type into a calculator or LLM.
Learning how to learn has been a boon throughout out history.
Math has been a staple for hundreds of years.
Being flexible and working in industry's as they start or change will help.