AI and emerging technologies

What MIT Technology Review has been tracking, across two snapshots roughly three weeks apart, is something harder to pin down than a single event: a mood. In April, the conversation was broad — the state of AI as a whole, paired with an item about using drones to protect bears, which tells you something about the editorial register. By early May, the framing had shifted toward "AI malaise," a phrase that carries real weight if you've been watching the breathless optimism of the past two years slowly curdle into something more complicated. The pairing with babymaking technology in the May edition isn't accidental editorial whimsy either — it suggests a publication deliberately stitching together stories about technology's promises and their quietly disappointing delivery. The arc from "state of AI" to "AI malaise" in three weeks is not a trajectory. It's a temperature reading.

If confirmed, here is what this means. The moment a publication like MIT Technology Review reaches for the word "malaise," something has already shifted in the professional class that reads it. Malaise is what you diagnose when hype and reality have been in a quiet argument for long enough that the hype starts losing. The practical consequence is a cooling of investment urgency — not a crash, but the kind of deliberate pause where enterprises that rushed AI deployments start auditing what they actually got. Second-order effect: the companies selling AI infrastructure face harder questions from procurement teams who now have eighteen months of real-world data and are no longer impressed by benchmarks. The babymaking tech angle matters too, because it signals that the "emerging tech" conversation is broadening beyond AI specifically — which could mean the industry is in a diversification moment, or simply that editors are hunting for stories that aren't ChatGPT adjacent.

Watch for whether mainstream business press picks up the malaise framing, and whether Q2 enterprise AI spending figures confirm or contradict the mood MIT Technology Review is documenting.

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