alt Hacker News> We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.
Nope. Any nation that thinks like this will be outcompeted by more tech-positive nations in the long-term. It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
Replies
>It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
Here's one study from last year (1000 students) [1]. They showed that improved outcomes with AI are short term, and likely a result of AI doing the work for the student. Their methodology involved a test without the use of AI at a later date, and one of the groups who used AI tested much worse than the control group who did not use AI during learning.
Moreover, a tertiary group that used a specially trained AI for tutoring showed no improvement in testing outcomes over the control group.
[1] Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics." PNAS, 122. PNAS
> It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
But then we're told we can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's too late, so we just have to suck it up and deal with it.
There's nothing preventing us from taking a more measured approach to new technology other than choice.