If the AI Bubble Pops, It Won’t Be the End
Like past waves of automation, AI isn’t going away. Boom or bust, the fight is over whose interests it will serve.
Whether the AI hype deflates or investment keeps pouring in, capital is committed to forcing AI into the workplace, reshaping jobs and lowering labor standards. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
A report from MIT says that the overwhelming majority of generative artificial intelligence implementations are failing — 95 percent of them, in fact. That’s a lot of failure. For a series of technologies touted as the answer to every question ever asked, literally and figuratively, the incapacity of companies to effectively integrate AI into their work says a lot about the next stage of industrial mechanization, our economic system, and us. But what it doesn’t say, whatever one may hope, is that AI is doomed.
The trick here is that you’ve got to read beyond the headline. The MIT report didn’t conclude that AI doesn’t work, as flawed as it is, but rather that many integrations aren’t working, at least as of now. As Jowi Morales puts it for Tom’s Hardware, integrations are failing to produce returns “because generic AI tools, like ChatGPT, do not adapt to the workflows that have already been established in the corporate environment.”
All-In on AI
The corporate response to these findings, or to similar ones, won’t be to abandon AI, but rather to force it even further upon workers and workplaces — reshaping established workflows, routines, and jobs themselves to fit the AI, rather than the other way around. Setbacks shouldn’t fool anyone about the direction of travel.
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