These days, if you want access to serious money — a grant to study something , a raise in salary to the altitude of a CEO, or a successful sale of stock at bloated prices — to pull any of these things off you gotta have bling. Not the kind you wear on your wrist, but the kind you spout from your mouth. If you know how to rap excitingly about the Next Big Thing, hundred-dollar bills will find their way to you like pigeons coming home for the night. But if all you want to talk about is making a quality product and treating people right, you better get on welfare quick.

Bling ages fast, and not well. Facebook had it once, but now that they have signed up every human on earth and have no way to grow until the Martian market opens up, Facebook is so yesterday. Cell phones, Google, Microsoft, Apple — all the blingers of yesterday are struggling to keep the con going despite their pot bellies and bald heads. Today — at least, so far today — all the bling in the room has been sucked up by stem cell research! Self driving cars! Crypto currencies! Blockchain! And especially — artificial intelligence!!!

No wonder then, that one of the frailest and oldest of the former blingers, IBM — with five and a half straight years of declining revenues on its books — desperate to return to the Days of Bling, grabbed onto artificial intelligence like a Titanic survivor swimming into a lifesaver. The company called its AI research programs, collectively, Watson, and as had become traditional among tech companies spent far more time and money telling us what it would one day do, than getting it to do much of anything. Watson is best known for having won at the TV trivia game Jeopardy. Obviously, the implications for the future of humankind were infinite.

From Superbowl commercials to news conferences and back, IBM spread the bling like manure on a fallow field. Watson could one day flawlessly predict the weather, do your taxes, and especially, cure cancer. Just two months ago, after meeting with President Trump (and apparently having been infected by his spasms of overstatement), the CEO of IBM gushed that Watson, soon, would be able to “address, diagnose, and treat 80 percent of what causes 80 percent of the cancer in the world.”

The bling was pretty successful. 60 Minutes did a fawning segment on Watson’s imminent defeat of cancer as we know it. More than 50 hospitals in the United States, China, India and South Korea paid millions of dollars each to have Watson provide second opinions for cancer doctors, by surveying instantly millions of research papers, clinical studies, images — even genome sequencing — and then, just like on Jeopardy, instantly spit out the right answer.

Cancer treatment, it turns out, is not at all like a TV game show. Who knew? Watson can’t read a lot of medical records, because doctors have bad handwriting — again, who knew? — and use abbreviations and acronyms known only to themselves. Just to input a patient’s records, it turns out, can be a tedious and time-consuming job that humans have to do. Watson can’t connect with a lot of medical networks out there. Watson, it turns out, does not have access to a very large database of research papers. IBM has never permitted a full, peer-reviewed study of its effectiveness, but according to unpublished studies, and some internal documents from IBM:

In the words of the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, Oren Etzioni, “IBM Watson is the Donald Trump of the AI industry—outlandish claims that aren’t backed by credible data. Everyone—journalists included—know[s] that the emperor has no clothes, but most are reluctant to say so.”

A doctor at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, yet another unhappy customer, was a bit more blunt. “This product,” he said, “Is a piece of shit.”

It’s artificial intelligence, doctor. They key word is artificial. It’s a piece of artificial shit.