{"id":3904,"date":"2025-09-06T17:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T17:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/3904\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T17:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T17:17:08","slug":"if-the-ai-bubble-pops-it-wont-be-the-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/3904\/","title":{"rendered":"If the AI Bubble Pops, It Won\u2019t Be the End"},"content":{"rendered":"

A report from MIT says that the overwhelming majority of generative artificial intelligence implementations are failing \u2014 95 percent<\/a> of them, in fact. That\u2019s 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\u2019t say, whatever one may hope, is that AI is doomed.<\/p>\n

The trick here is that you\u2019ve got to read beyond the headline. The MIT report didn\u2019t conclude that AI doesn\u2019t work, as flawed as it is, but rather that many integrations aren\u2019t working, at least as of now. As Jowi Morales puts it<\/a> for Tom\u2019s Hardware, integrations are failing to produce returns \u201cbecause generic AI tools, like ChatGPT, do not adapt to the workflows that have already been established in the corporate environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The corporate response to these findings, or to similar ones, won\u2019t be to abandon AI, but rather to force it even further upon workers and workplaces \u2014 reshaping established workflows, routines, and jobs themselves to fit the AI, rather than the other way around. Setbacks shouldn\u2019t fool anyone about the direction of travel.<\/p>\n

Over at Meta, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg is freezing<\/a> hires in the AI division. Scale AI, in which the Facebook parent company has invested over $14 billion, is cutting<\/a> 14 percent of its staff. The headlines are fueling talk of an AI slowdown or crash, of the bubble bursting. The pace and scale of AI investment in recent years has been accompanied by breathless talk of AI revolutions, of the imminent and irreversible shift to a new technological and industrial order. One is hard-pressed to click more than twice now while browsing the internet or opening an app or service without encountering some AI integration, from word processors to retail shop chat bots to social media and search engines and beyond. It all has the air of a Ponzi scheme on the brink of being exposed.<\/p>\n

That scheme is already leading to tens of thousands of job losses<\/a>, with more expected. The risks for workers are real. As companies go all-in on AI, even should they scale back a scooch, they remain committed to transforming work through automation \u2014 that is, to improving \u201cefficiencies\u201d and eroding both labor power and cost. AI is poised to kill millions<\/a> of jobs around the world sooner than one might think. Yet its vaunted automation, efficiency, and autonomy rest on vast amounts of human labor \u2014 moderation, annotation, data labeling, troubleshooting, repair, and more. AI may render countless jobs redundant, but it also creates and transforms others. The catch is that many of these new jobs are miserable, and the overall shift drags down labor standards and pay.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, it won\u2019t matter how much anyone insists that the AI emperor has no clothes; the hundreds of billions invested in AI have established, and will maintain, an internal hope, logic, and expectation that the series of technologies are and must be the future of knowledge, manufacturing, and service. Faced with AI\u2019s limits and the attendant enshittification<\/a>, as Cory Doctorow might put it, of so many aspects of life, one might expect technocrats and oligopolists \u2014 corporate and political alike \u2014 to pause, take stock, consult with the population at large, and adjust. But that\u2019s unlikely. In short, the corporate world is \u201cpot committed,\u201d to borrow a poker term, to the AI revolution, such as it is.<\/p>\n

Anti-AI optimists might see a bubble bursting or a revolution failing. But for those struggling over the future of labor and the democratization of AI<\/a>, the smarter reading is that this is, at best, a strategic retreat or consolidation of AI integrations. This means preparing, strategizing, and responding accordingly. Meta itself framed<\/a> its hiring freeze as \u201cbasic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.\u201d As much as one might hate to admit it, the smart money right now \u2014 that is to say, the power \u2014 is on Meta and its competitors shaping the industrial space as they wish. This is especially true amid democratic backsliding in the United States and its deepening entanglement<\/a> with the tech oligarchy.<\/p>\n

To ask whether certain AI technologies will ever \u201cwork\u201d is to ask the wrong question, or at least one of secondary, even tertiary, importance. There\u2019s a global race to develop and deploy AI, a contest that at once encompasses a kind of geopolitical strategic jockeying that puts states at odds with one another, and a broader capitalist urge to transform technology and work in the interests of their class across state borders. The capital and political heft behind the AI movement is accordingly robust, with its devotees viewing efforts as strategic necessities rather than technological frivolities.<\/p>\n

Setting aside that there\u2019s a difference between types of AI, their deployments, and their integrations \u2014 some of which are already working \u2014 the core questions for labor, mass politics, and consumers are: To what ends will AI be deployed, to whose benefit, and under whose control? As things stand, there are plenty of reasons to believe the answer to each question is oligarchs and oligopolists under, perhaps, some nominal control of a technocratic ruling class that will act as, at best, a regulatory rubber stamp \u2014 and institutional investor or underwriter. And with the state itself backing the broader AI rollout, that is, as they say, the ball game.<\/p>\n

The risk of buying into the idea that the AI bubble is bursting is that it risks lulling us into a false sense of comfort, into complacency. For those who want a technological \u2013 and political and economic \u2013 future marked by deep democratization and collective control, the starting point must be that AI, in one form or another, is here to stay. The task now is not to wait for collapse, but to organize for control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A report from MIT says that the overwhelming majority of generative artificial intelligence implementations are failing \u2014 95…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-3904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}