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…writes a person who's never been a CEO before. Which is not to say that AI won't be immensely helpful for running companies; just that once you're in the role

by mxstbr 3y ago

…writes a person who's never been a CEO before. Which is not to say that AI won't be immensely helpful for running companies; just that once you're in the role for two days you realize that replacing that role entirely isn't going to happen. > AI can win at chess now. You think being a CEO is harder than chess? Come on. Being a CEO isn't like playing chess. Being a CEO is more like a really complex version of self-driving cars. Why? Because it involves interacting with other humans, all the time. It's all people problems. Chess isn't. Chess is decision-making with a finite (if immense) set of possibilities. Very different set of problems.

foldr 3y ago
>just that once you're in the role for two days you realize that replacing that role entirely isn't going to happen. Journalists might very well say the same thing (when people who've never been journalists talk about replacing them with AI).
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  The kind of journalism that journalists want you to think they do - going out into war zones or directly interviewing people to find out new things of public interest - isn't replaceable by AI. The kind of journalism they actually do - hanging out on Twitter and repeating whatever goes trending there - is easily replaceable. They did this to themselves.
  - foldr 3y ago
    That is certainly the view of many people who aren't writers or journalists. We'll see if it plays out. Jobs do tend to appear simpler than they really are when looking in from the outside. >They did this to themselves. And who set this bad direction? The CEO. This hardly adds to the case for not replacing him with an AI.
    - jonas21 3y ago
      It is also the view of many working journalists, or at least the ones I know. And it's not like some CEO decided "hey, let's pivot to churning out low-quality clickbait because I really like that stuff." They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising and the consolidation of news readership into a small number of well-known publications. Though I do agree that it's equally unfair to blame journalists for this.
      - coldpie 3y ago
        > They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising Indeed. As with almost everything else terrible about the world today, the root of the problem is targeted-advertising-based business models.
        pixelrevision 3y ago
        It really has caused a race to the bottom anywhere it becomes the primary business model. Everyone hates it but no one’s got a solve to get people paying for things once they are “free”.
      - foldr 3y ago
        We'll see how successful the autogenerated clickbait farms end up being. But nothing you're saying is really making a case for the company needing a visionary human intelligence for its CEO. If the entire business model of the company is strictly determined by external conditions, then the whole thing seems ripe for automation.
      - topaz0 3y ago
        > forced Only if you consider it to be inevitable that their primary goal is to make themselves and their owners preposterously rich.
bumby 3y ago
Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  "Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not" I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
  - bumby 3y ago
    If that's the case, can you define those succinctly here?
  - nradov 3y ago
    My MBA program did not teach a rigid, well-defined set of business rules. Even something rules based like GAAP is somewhat open to interpretation. And when it comes to something like strategy or finance or organizational structure the options are endless.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Only the dumbest tik-tok positive grindset twitter thread version of the above suggests that doing x, y & z will gaurantee a win in business.
- awegio 3y ago
  > mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy That actually sounds a lot like model based reinforcement learning. AlphaGo still had an explicit model of a perfect information game, but newer algorithms are capable of learning the rules of games like Minecraft with very little prior information. The problem is that the real world is still much more complicated and hard to access for machines. However, I wouldn't say it is a fundamentally different problem, but rather a matter of scale. That's part of the reason why AI research spent so much effort on building game playing systems.

by mxstbr 3y ago

foldr 3y ago

>just that once you're in the role for two days you realize that replacing that role entirely isn't going to happen. Journalists might very well say the same thing (when people who've never been journalists talk about replacing them with AI).

pclmulqdq 3y ago
The kind of journalism that journalists want you to think they do - going out into war zones or directly interviewing people to find out new things of public interest - isn't replaceable by AI. The kind of journalism they actually do - hanging out on Twitter and repeating whatever goes trending there - is easily replaceable. They did this to themselves.
- foldr 3y ago
  That is certainly the view of many people who aren't writers or journalists. We'll see if it plays out. Jobs do tend to appear simpler than they really are when looking in from the outside. >They did this to themselves. And who set this bad direction? The CEO. This hardly adds to the case for not replacing him with an AI.
  - jonas21 3y ago
    It is also the view of many working journalists, or at least the ones I know. And it's not like some CEO decided "hey, let's pivot to churning out low-quality clickbait because I really like that stuff." They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising and the consolidation of news readership into a small number of well-known publications. Though I do agree that it's equally unfair to blame journalists for this.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      > They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising Indeed. As with almost everything else terrible about the world today, the root of the problem is targeted-advertising-based business models.
      - pixelrevision 3y ago
        It really has caused a race to the bottom anywhere it becomes the primary business model. Everyone hates it but no one’s got a solve to get people paying for things once they are “free”.
    - foldr 3y ago
      We'll see how successful the autogenerated clickbait farms end up being. But nothing you're saying is really making a case for the company needing a visionary human intelligence for its CEO. If the entire business model of the company is strictly determined by external conditions, then the whole thing seems ripe for automation.
    - topaz0 3y ago
      > forced Only if you consider it to be inevitable that their primary goal is to make themselves and their owners preposterously rich.

bumby 3y ago

Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.

passwordoops 3y ago
"Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not" I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
- bumby 3y ago
  If that's the case, can you define those succinctly here?
- nradov 3y ago
  My MBA program did not teach a rigid, well-defined set of business rules. Even something rules based like GAAP is somewhat open to interpretation. And when it comes to something like strategy or finance or organizational structure the options are endless.
- blitzar 3y ago
  Only the dumbest tik-tok positive grindset twitter thread version of the above suggests that doing x, y & z will gaurantee a win in business.
awegio 3y ago
> mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy That actually sounds a lot like model based reinforcement learning. AlphaGo still had an explicit model of a perfect information game, but newer algorithms are capable of learning the rules of games like Minecraft with very little prior information. The problem is that the real world is still much more complicated and hard to access for machines. However, I wouldn't say it is a fundamentally different problem, but rather a matter of scale. That's part of the reason why AI research spent so much effort on building game playing systems.