Ask HN: What to teach my kid if AI does math and CS?
5 points
4 hours ago
| 7 comments
| HN
I am home-schooling my kid. He shares my interest in math and CS, and he's really good at it.

I've been cheering him on a path towards academic success in these 2 fields. In parts because I am not much use at anything else, in parts because he likes it, in parts because that's where I found some measure of success in life.

However, I can't go through a day without reading another article about how AI solved an Erdös problem previously unsolved by humans[1], is getting gold medals at International Mathematical Olympiads[2], is replacing coders at Microsoft[3] and even architects[4].

This makes me really question what I am doing.

Sure, people tell me what matters is training your brain, it's never about the skill itself, but learning to learn, etc... Maybe that's right, but somehow, I can't shake the feeling that I am setting my kid on a path that leads directly into a solid brick wall.

What are the alternatives though?

Play video games all day long and wait for Universal Basic Income to kick in?

Encourage him to pivot towards humanities subject he has no strong interest in, that I would not be great at teaching, and that I've been taught young do not lead to great job opportunities?

Forget math and CS, and teach him how to build and run businesses, banning the reading of any article that shows AI might also be taking this over?

Close my eyes, do not listen to this feeling inside, and continue to teach python generators and linear algebra?

Does anyone have any suggestion, or random comment?

[1]: https://officechai.com/ai/gpt-5-2-and-harmonic-appear-to-have-autonomously-solved-an-erdos-problem-that-had-been-unsolved-by-humans-thus-far/

[2]: https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/ai-reasoning-math-olympiad-imo

[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-30-of-the-companys-code-was-written-by-ai/

[4]: https://x.com/rakyll/status/2007239758158975130

codingdave
2 hours ago
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> ... that I would not be great at teaching...

First, don't limit your child's education to what you are good at. That is doing them a massive disservice. You don't have to be good at teaching something for your child to learn it. You just need to find and provide resources and help them self-navigate the topic.

Secondly, who cares if AI can do something better? That doesn't mean to avoid learning. People play chess even though grandmasters exist who will always be better than them. People learn to write even though there are professional novelists and poets. Not only is it OK to learn something even if others are better at it, that is kind of the entire point of education.

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nicbou
4 hours ago
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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.

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ThrowawayR2
3 hours ago
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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.

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ferguess_k
3 hours ago
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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.

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iExploder
1 hour ago
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I would dual class social skills and martial arts... aka make them like you, if they dont just beat em up...
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al_borland
3 hours ago
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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.

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ironbound
4 hours ago
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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.

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