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Percy Shelley lived and died over two centuries ago, and he still belongs to the vanishingly small class of poets that Americans can recall by name. 

Across his short 29 years on Earth, the Englishman left behind a strong enough body of work that teachers are willing to deal with the inevitable fallout of assigning a writer named Bysshe to high school boys. 

That assigned reading would be enough to cement his name alongside your Edith Whartons and Harper Lees in the brains of many Americans, who tend to stop reading the exact second it’s no longer required of them. But what really made him stick around when so many of his fellow Romantics faded into obscurity and intolerable academic dinner party conversations was one poem: “Ozymandias.”

It’s a bit of a funny joke that the Shelley piece that’s been endlessly remixed and referenced across American comic books, television shows and movies is itself about the folly of trying to make anything that lasts. It’s the story of a story about a forgotten city in the desert. An expanse of endless sand is interrupted by the stumps of a formerly impressive statue, standing above the iconic declaration of an unremembered king, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

“Time” isn’t anything close to what it once was, but the crumbling remains of the once-great periodical still likes to dress up and play kingmaker every year, declaring the “Person of the Year” with all the weight of a century of back issues behind it.

The magazine’s pick is frequently controversial, if only because many readers misinterpret the designation of importance for an endorsement. Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump and You have all been the most important person at some point in “Time,” and there’s no denying the periodical’s  significance argument for any of those choices. What irks about this year’s pick isn’t that artificial intelligence peddlers are morally good or bad, it’s that they aren’t going to have any lasting effect on humanity.  

Time’s editors added insult to injury, editing the industry’s most notable trombone salesmen into the iconic image of construction workers taking a break while building 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But AI won’t stand as tall for as long as the one-time RCA building. It’s em-dash-filled pablum and overfingered monstrosities won’t stick in the imagination the way “Lunch atop a skyscraper” has. Like the NFT fad before it, AI’s destiny is to be a trivia question. 

That doesn’t mean AI’s current reality-warping effect isn’t real. The artificial intelligence industry feels huge right now because it is. Endless man-hours, unconscionable amounts of fresh water and billions upon billions of dollars are being poured into an idea. The powers that be are currently propping up this assetless bubble, all on the promises that the copyright-infringement and cheating-at-homework machine will one day become all things to all people. The U.S. government has thrown their lot in entirely with a product that doesn’t make any money, doesn’t solve any problems and only occasionally works as intended.

By some measures, AI-related investment accounted for half of US GDP growth in the first six months of 2025. That money hasn’t made anything of value, but it has inflated the stock prices of shares held in millions of Americans’ pensions and index funds. AI is unique in that it will have made nothing, but its end will still leave behind a colossal wreck.

What do you think? Will there be any lasting effect from AI beyond layoffs? Given a few billion more dollars, will it ever create something of value? Click the speech bubble icon to sound off in the comments.

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