This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically good writers who were told they’re good thinkers because their writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools, as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way.

In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school.

How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.