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187 lines
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[1]Skip to content[2]Skip to site index
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[4]Today’s Paper
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[5]Opinion|The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes
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[6][7]
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html
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Opinion
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
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The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes
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March 29, 2025
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A photo illustration of an in box and an out box. The in box is stacked high
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with papers, the out box is empty. The background is lemon yellow.
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Credit...Photo Illustration by Leslie dela Vega/The New York Times. Photograph
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by Swilmor, via Getty Images
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Listen to this article · 10:21 min [17]Learn more
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[23]Tressie McMillan Cottom
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By [24]Tressie McMillan Cottom
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Opinion Columnist
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Behold the decade of mid tech!
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That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with
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the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally
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gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new
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technology that I know mid when I see it.
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Academics are rarely good stand-ins for typical workers. But the mid technology
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revolution is an exception. It has come for us first. Some of it has even come
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from us, genuinely exciting academic inventions and research science that could
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positively contribute to society. But what we’ve already seen in academia is
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that the use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and
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life have started to get silly really fast. Most of us aren’t using A.I. to
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[25]save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre
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improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about
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A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with
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something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now
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take two hours!”
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Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.
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A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration
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rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout
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experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out
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that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing
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points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother,
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faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s
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adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t
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particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening
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lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me.
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The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo [26]call these kinds of
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technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind
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of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out
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annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries.
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Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech
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billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left
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behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to
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do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who
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fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive
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power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the
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future before everyone else.
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The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I.
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spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our
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calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a
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mid revolution of mid tasks.
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[25] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/well/ai-drug-repurposing.html
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