Two of our writers at Mind Matters News, technology consultant Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith, offer some hard truths about AI boosterism at MarketWatch: The fanciful forecasts have not so far produced meaningful revenue and productivity.

They offer an example:

AI’s dominance always seems to be five to 10 years away. Recall the esteemed computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton — known as “the godfather of AI” — declaring in 2016: “If you work as a radiologist, you’re like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down, so it doesn’t realize that there is no ground underneath him. I think we should stop training radiologists now; it’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”

The number of radiologists practicing in the U.S. has increased since then. “What is AI really giving back to tech investors? Here’s the hard truth,” May 14, 2025

It’s a good thing that medical schools did not stop training radiologists.

Funk and Smith point out that the AI industry acts like it knows this, even if it doesn’t admit as much:

Even AI engineers, scientists and suppliers admit that LLMs are better at generating text than generating profits. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said recently that AI won’t replace programmers anytime soon; Microsoft researchers concluded that programmers spend most of their time debugging, a task that LLMs struggle with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that, from a value standpoint, AI supply is far outpacing demand. In midApril, Microsoft announced that it was “slowing or pausing” the construction of several data centers, including a $1 billion Ohio project. “Here’s the hard truth,”

The current picture doesn’t, of course, demonstrate that AI will never become more profitable. But when a chain of events becomes a pattern, there are usually lessons to be learned.

Many businesses, for example, rushed into AI without any clear, specific idea of why or how. Some big retailers, for example, have had to cut back as a result.

For that matter, some CEOs may underestimate what the people who work for them actually do for a living. Like Klarna’s boss, they imagine that they can program a sophisticated machine to do all that, find out the hard way, and are hiring back the employees…