Huh, I had no idea that Stephen Wolfram and I have much in common in the mathematical realm.

Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division and didn’t learn his times tables until he’d hit 40. Indeed, the inspiration for Wolfram|Alpha, which he released in 2009, started with Wolfram’s own struggles as a math student. Growing up, Wolfram’s obsession was physics. By 12, he’d written a dictionary on physics, by his early teens he’d churned out three (as yet unpublished) books, and by 15 he was publishing scientific papers.

Despite his wunderkind science abilities, math was a constant stumbling block. He could come up with concepts, but executing calculations was hard. His solution was to get his hands on a computer. By programming it to solve equations and find patterns in data, he could leave the math to the machine and focus his brain on the science.

According to STEM people, folks like Stephen Wolfram and I don’t exist — that is, high IQ people who are atrocious at math.

Yet here we are. I’m sitting right here.

There is not a concept in math I cannot understand. Often I understand the concepts and implications thereof better than those who are able to work out the problems. They call me dumb. Meanwhile, they have no clue what they are actually doing.

But ask me to “solve for x?” Might as well forget it, because it won’t happen.

This is something I’d also been thinking about a lot — those who are good at the minutiae of how to plug terms into equations and such are soon to be outmoded. Relegated to desuetude. Computers already are and will be so much better at it that humans who waste their time learning such things will be left far behind in the near future.

Wolfram seems to agree.

Wolfram never planned for his tool to become highbrow CliffsNotes, but he’s not too concerned about it, either. “Mechanical math,” Wolfram argues, “is a very low level of precise thinking.” Instead, Wolfram believes that we should be emphasizing computational thinking—something he describes as “trying to formulate your thoughts so that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer.” This has also been called computer-based math. Essentially, knowing algebra in today’s technology-saturated world won’t get you very far, but knowing how to ask a computer to do your algebra will. If students are making this shift, in his mind, they’re just ahead of the curve.

“Mechanical math” which is what I call “operational math” I am admittedly very bad at. Besides that, though, it always seemed such a huge waste of time to me. Why bother with this when I could be pondering something that mattered? Couldn’t a machine do this worthless rote work that achieves nothing?

This is going to sound arrogant as all hell, but the future is people like me: those with good conceptual understanding in many areas, with decent to high social skills* who can understand business and business people, and who are also good writers, communicators, and inter-area mediators who can sit in front of a computer or AI and instruct it how to solve a problem at a high level in its own terms of comprehension.

The future ain’t working out musty equations on paper the same as in 1680. That is already over, done, gone, not coming back, ever.

*It took me many years of hard effort to achieve good social skills. The paradox of this is that if you have poor social skills, you are heavily penalized for this and then they tend to atrophy ever more over time until your every effort to improve only makes you a bigger creep, jerk or loser in the minds of those with high social skills. It took me just herculean effort to break this impasse.