You see productivity gains have nothing to do with AI. It’s being pushed down our throats because some elites have vested interest in its success and it’s another way to extract more money from the consumers.
Because they don’t actually care about “speed” or “efficiency”. All they care about is having all the money. Every decision they make is in service of that goal, including what words they say in public.
Real answer: because the CEO is the figurehead of the company. An AI can do exactly what a CEO can do except actually interacting with people. So the only necessary and “irreplaceable” job of the CEO is to meet with people and get them to make a deal or invest or whatever.
That being said, I don’t think there’s any job an LLM can replace a human for. Human’s aren’t hired as next word predictors. Even the CEO has more to their decision making job than making decisions. Knowing what decisions to make is something the AI can’t do.
CEOs are overpaid though. Their jobs aren’t hard and mostly what determines their success is luck.
The rich have class solidarity. They’re not going to casually fuck each other over like that.
But they’re controlled by shareholders and why do shareholders want individual nut jobs running a company when and AI can do it. Not saying we’re any where close to AI that can do this. But the idea is neat. CEO of these publicly traded companies seems like the first job that should be axed.
I assume rich people often keep enough shares to control who sits on the board, and thus who is the CEO. There’s a lot of people sitting on multiple boards, folks know each other, blah blah blah.
Also many shareholders aren’t really involved. I don’t even know how it works if you own shares through Vanguard or something. I’ve never been asked to vote on company policy.
From what I’ve seen in start-up land, leadership is a lot of in-group bro times. It’s all gut feel. Shouldn’t expect rational, honest, decisions from them.
You should be getting letters or emails about upcoming shareholder meetings and proxy votes. If not, that’s a problem.
Apparently Vanguard has a whole proxy voting system that I left on the defaults!
Chances are the shareholders with enough power to sway things are… Other CEOs though
They all sit on each others boards.
However it just takes a few activist board members who have big time fomo and want to be early in with a virtual CEO.
I’m sure I will be put out to pasture first, but at least I will be laughing from my cardboard box.
I would be all for new regulation that changed that. In order to go public you cannot have a majority shareholder. I won’t pretend I know what I’m talking about. But my gut says if you’re going public you wish your business to grow to a point that it’ll have large impacts to a good chunk of people and so there should be more democratic decision making in places including adding people local to these businesses in as stake holders.
Like the decision should be that if you’re soliciting more money to grow, you forfeit ownership because your business now becomes something new. It becomes a shared public interest. So you can’t have an Elon or Steve Jobs. You have a board who answers to stake holders without a single one having some ultimate power. Then you must bring in a certain amount of employees into that process
there is no rationale to capitalism, it’s more like a heist
It’s one of the most rationale things there is
I don’t really buy this take. They have petty spats, noncompetitive practices, just like the rest of us. Seems like there are simpler explanations.
Solidarity doesn’t mean they’re all in love and never squabble. But it does mean that they will prioritize their class’ interests, especially if it’s in conflict with labor.
I think that’s more coincidental than actual solidarity. They all just happen to have the same goals - pursuit of personal net worth high score. I’m sure there’s some collusion between a few of them though.
Solidarity doesn’t have to mean they like have a club with a secret handshake. Their goals are aligned, and they tend to work towards those goals, even without explicit coordination. It’s rare to see anyone in the ownership class work against those interests. You don’t see a lot of the owners saying “we should give people more time off” or “we should let the workers have a say”. It’s pretty consistently “we should squeeze people for more money”. It makes the news when ownership is like “We’re going to pay people more”, and it doesn’t make the news when labor is like “i’ll just work a little more off the clock to catch up”.
Contrast with labor, where people are often undermining their interests. Being anti-union, voting against regulations that would protect them from exploitation, giving away labor for free.
But CEO pay largely isn’t in conflict with labor; it’s in conflict with shareholders (namely, large scale investors). There are at least 3 fairly large groups of people who would all have to let the money run through their hands before labor sees a dime of current CEO pay. CEOs themselves (and, more broadly, C-suite), the shareholders (which you could subdivide by board-members vs hedge funds vs small investors), and governments (at various scales).
Catching crime lords in hypocritical pretzel logic doesn’t work. The issue isn’t with their logic. The issue is with a society that allows itself to be captured by capitalism.
Kick me in the brain stem if I’m on the wrong track, but I feel like it’s by design
In general,
Everyone hates public officials taking bribes
Everyone hates streaming services raising their subscription fees
Everyone hates advertisements
Everyone hates big pharma charging $1000 for a cancer treatment pill that costs 0.1c to manufacture
The throughline is obvious, but I feel most people just take a neutral or dismissive (and sometimes aggressive) stance if you bring it up.
It’s that cognitive dissonance that feels engineered.
I don’t know how to fix that. Admittedly, I still need to do more reading.
I think our problem might be starting a slave empire on stolen land and then building a bunch of prisons instead of a society. Maybe next time, don’t be born 17 generations into a crumbling colonial slave empire. That’s what I’m going to try.
For a publicly traded business, this could greatly benefit the share holder with a more efficient AI CEO to steer the ship.
Less sexual harassment lawsuits too
Now there is an idea. But the money that the CEO would be paid would go to workers right? Right?!
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I think that middle management has more to worry about.
Its likely the only use case that would actually pay off and it makes sense as the board of directors can have it made and maybe even do a lot of chief and vp stuff.
AI is currently really bad with business decisions. Like laughably so. There have been several small attempts, say letting an LLM manage a vending machine. I believe they’ve all flopped. Compare to performance in image creation/editing and programming performance (where, on measurables, they do relatively well). When an AI that could run a business OK exists, you should expect to see it happen.
CEO’s are paid so much primarily because the turn to paying them in stocks. This changed because of pay-caps for executives (so to compete for CEOS, companies offered stocks). The idea was that this would align their incentives with the shareholders. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of extremely short term company policy by CEOs, spiking stock value to cash out.
This is possible and much easier than with the people who usually do the actual work that makes a company sucessfull.
For example, this chinese company has done it and performs very well: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html
You would not want to use AI anywhere it matters. Only in places where it does not matter if you get it right the first, second or even the third time, like customer support.
We’re going inception style now, but then ceo would be even more fitting, don’t you think?
It doesn’t matter, so … the CEO is perfect application!
i said back when people first started talking about AI replacing workers… if there’s one job that can easily be replaced by AI, it’s a fucking CEO.
Might end up with more humanity in business decisions by replacing the empathy-devoid CEOs currently running things with something trained on a larger sample of people.
Because the purpose of a CEO is wealth transfer. Controlling the company is purely incidental.
This wasn’t particularly true all that long ago. Huge buyouts and benefits for CEOs are both quite recent phenomena. Shareholders had a much better split not that long ago, and the social/family dynamics haven’t had long to change so drastically.
CEO is a political position, not a productive role. The job of the Chief Executive is to be a high level influencer with lenders, high level clients, and other business partners. For AIs to fill this role, they would need to be established as more influential than their human peers.
While its certainly possible (and arguably the desired end result of Microsoft/Google/et al) to replace a C-level with an AI, the end result would be a machine that serves the interests of the operators (presumably Microsoft/Google/whomever) rather than the business for which it is providing the service.
