AI Won’t Fix Bad Management

Remember that MIT study I wrote about that found that the overwhelming preponderance of AI projects fail? And I attributed the failure to bad management?

It seems there’s an article in Fortune captioned “An MIT report finding 95% of AI pilots fail spooked investors. It should have spooked C-suite execs instead.” It apparently said pretty much the same thing.

I don’t subscribe to Fortune so I couldn’t read the whole thing. Maybe if someone else does (or are better at hacking into it than I am), they could verify my supposition about the article.

This whole generative artificial intelligence frenzy reminds me of an old wisecrack about computers from fifty or more years ago: with the aid of a computer in a fraction of a second you can make a mistake that would have taken years to make by hand.

I’ve got another one that I do know the source for: “To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.” The newspaper columnistBill Vaughan wrote that in 1969.

2 comments… add one
  • bob sykes Link

    I used to tell my students, The computer is not the work of the Devil, it is the Devil incarnate.

    While I can see how AI can automate searches and correlations, I don’t see how rummaging through the accumulated detritus of human nonsense can lead to any truly productive results. The mean of a crowd is a harmonic mean, and the collective crowd is always stupider than its most stupid member.

    By the way, Chinese use of AI is narrowly limited to optimizing well-defined operations, especially in manufacturing and transportation. That seems entirely possible.

  • walt moffett Link

    I believe the technical term is Garbage In, Garbage Out GIGO.

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