Is that really a fair comparison though? Were there any stats showing that ball pens directly impacted metrics like grades?
I understand that it's harder to see things without the benefit of hindsight, but we must agree that AI's impact on students (or society, to be even more vague) has a much larger scope.
I'm frankly not sure in both cases, just commenting on how over the ages things change but remain the same. If the broader concern about AI blunting thoughts, introduce laziness etc is true, so are things like calculators, although I agree on much smaller scale.
I do share some of the concerns, though I don't have kids of school going age.