New York City was not built by people who were scared.
The whole point of the city has always been the speed and grit and ambition of its people. If there was a new tool that could build higher, move faster, or make someone more money, New Yorkers grabbed it with both hands.
Which makes watching Mayor Zohran Mamdani ban artificial intelligence in public schools until ninth grade just … embarrassing.
Mamdani plans to cut off around 600,000 children from the biggest piece of technology to arrive in their lifetimes. He calls it an effort to “get the future right” and push back against Silicon Valley.
In other words, City Hall is panicking — and banning everything like they always do.
Watching this from London, the stench of decline is unmistakable. In Britain, our politicians have spent decades doing this exact same routine. Whenever the world changes, we don’t try to build something better. We just set up an inquiry, launch a review panel, and try to regulate the danger away.
The result is that Britain doesn’t build things anymore. Our economy is flat on its back, and our best talent is sprinting away. Choosing safety over innovation inevitably leads to neither. Only stagnation.
Now, NYC is borrowing Britain’s worst habit: treating ambition like it’s something to be managed.
The irony at the center of this ban would be funny if it weren’t so damaging. While middle schoolers are not allowed to touch AI, their teachers are still allowed to use it to plan lessons and do administrative work. The state employees get the time-saver, and the children get nothing.
When the teachers union boss, Michael Mulgrew, calls the tech “very dangerous,” he isn’t trying to protect childhood. He’s protecting a bloated school bureaucracy that can’t be bothered to rewrite its lesson plans. Which is exactly what schools need to do if they are going to meet the challenges of the modern world.
Don’t get me wrong, dumping tablets on children has been an absolute disaster. Handing an 8-year-old a screen so an AI can think for them turns their brain to mush. Children still need to sit with a book, hold a pen, do long division on scrap paper, and argue with someone looking them in the eye.
But as we have learned, bans don’t work. Students currently use and abuse AI to cut corners on their school work. Banning AI won’t make this problem go away, but make the tech even more desirable and push its use underground.
Worse, children from affluent families won’t be impacted by Mamdani’s plan. Private schools in Manhattan will hire tutors. The families who can afford it will make sure their children are five steps ahead. Ironically, the only children being held back are the working-class families stuck in the public system. They will be even less prepared to enter the modern workforce than their peers who already started off with an upper hand.
Children in Singapore, Bengaluru, and Seoul are being taught to use AI, and children in NYC are being taught to fear it. But AI is not going away, and teachers, administrators, and policymakers will have to accept that and adapt. That will require innovative policy, and a great deal of trial and error: new curriculum and teaching methods that work complementarily with AI rather than simply depending on it as a crutch.
New York didn’t become the center of the world by being timid. If City Hall wants to turn the city into an open-air museum run by clueless politicians, it should just say so. But it shouldn’t be surprised when the rest of the world moves on.
Samiksha Bhattacharjee is the head of Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK, a Young Voices UK contributor, and the president of the University College London Libertarian Society. You can find more of her work at Samiksha’s State of the Debate.