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1 [1]Skip to content[2]Skip to site index 2 [3] 3 4 [4]Today’s Paper 5 [5]Opinion|The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes 6 [6][7] 7 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html 8 9 • Share full article 10 • 11 • 12 • 656 13 [12]656 14 15 Advertisement 16 17 [13]SKIP ADVERTISEMENT 18 You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When 19 we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. 20 [14] 21 Opinion 22 23 Supported by 24 25 [15]SKIP ADVERTISEMENT 26 27 Tressie McMillan Cottom 28 29 The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes 30 31 March 29, 2025 32 A photo illustration of an in box and an out box. The in box is stacked high 33 with papers, the out box is empty. The background is lemon yellow. 34 Credit...Photo Illustration by Leslie dela Vega/The New York Times. Photograph 35 by Swilmor, via Getty Images 36 Listen to this article · 10:21 min [17]Learn more 37 38 • Share full article 39 • 40 • 41 • 656 42 [22]656 43 44 [23]Tressie McMillan Cottom 45 46 By [24]Tressie McMillan Cottom 47 48 Opinion Columnist 49 50 Behold the decade of mid tech! 51 52 That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with 53 the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally 54 gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new 55 technology that I know mid when I see it. 56 57 Academics are rarely good stand-ins for typical workers. But the mid technology 58 revolution is an exception. It has come for us first. Some of it has even come 59 from us, genuinely exciting academic inventions and research science that could 60 positively contribute to society. But what we’ve already seen in academia is 61 that the use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and 62 life have started to get silly really fast. Most of us aren’t using A.I. to 63 [25]save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre 64 improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about 65 A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with 66 something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now 67 take two hours!” 68 69 Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat. 70 71 A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration 72 rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout 73 experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out 74 that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing 75 points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother, 76 faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s 77 adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t 78 particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening 79 lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me. 80 81 The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo [26]call these kinds of 82 technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind 83 of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out 84 annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries. 85 86 Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech 87 billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left 88 behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to 89 do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who 90 fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive 91 power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the 92 future before everyone else. 93 94 The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I. 95 spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our 96 calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a 97 mid revolution of mid tasks. 98 99 We are having trouble retrieving the article content. 100 101 Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. 102 103 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 104 105 Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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