[pjc50]

Tetraethyl lead is not useless; in fact, it was hugely useful to the petrol engine economy throughout the 20th century! It just happens to cause nonobvious brain damage throughout societies.

In some ways things that are both useful and harmful are the hardest to deal with. And this isn't just "prestige", it's the already-decaying post-truth infosphere and the already-overheating CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

AI is useful in cases where you can automatically catch errors. Programming is uniquely suitable for this, because we have already got all our machinery of type systems and CI tests to catch human errors. How useful it is in other cases depends on how cheap it is to catch errors and how much they cost - and whether the cost of errors is inflicted on other people.