6 ms·

If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

73 points by hodgesrm 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
geod_of_ix 2y ago
The only way this will happen is if the shareholders realize that they can save money, and generate even more profit for them. Perhaps we need to demonstrate this experimentally and compare the results to CEO's in similar industries. Then watch as it is immediately and resoundingly banned through legislation and rhetoric.
hodgesrm 2y ago
> “Someone who is already quite advanced in their career and is already fairly self-motivated may not need a human boss anymore,” said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. “In that case, software for self-management can even enhance worker agency.” This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.
- _nalply 2y ago
  Perhaps: - solve problems and conflicts - escalate if neccessary - communicate targets But not: - provide fuzzy warm feeling of belonging (at least in the companies where you are just a wheel) So, replacing management is an old idea, but perhaps becoming feasible? Or did I miss something irreplaceable of the human element?
  - NhanH 2y ago
    Are we talking about middle managers or line managers? For line managers, the manager has to talk with human employees, and bad managers asides, that is where the human element comes in: fundamentally, your employees are still human. On the other hand, if the line managers are all human, then the middle managers have the same human elements, too.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Google did a huge study of what makes a good manager (after trying to do without them) and found that a big deliverable of management is “psychological safety” for individuals when they are working as a team. Without that, people hoard information and spend all their effort to undercut each other, which is detrimental to the team and company overall.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      At Google, where they foster a culture of intellectual safety. Their systems are so complex that no one person knows everything, and having people bullshit their way around things is dangerous, so people have up feel safe to ask "dumb" questions in order to make good decisions. At other companies with different cultural values, say Microsoft of the 90's with stack ranking, a good manager may need to foster the opposite in order for their direct reports to succeed in that culture.
      - _nalply 2y ago
        Some people feel safer asking the LLM dumb questions, at least I do because of social pressure, but answers could be bullshit. I am retired but I could imagine that I only would proceed if I either had good enough references backing the LLM's answer or if I decided that my question is not so dumb after all and took the plunge to ask a human. This seems to indicate that AI could relieve managers from answering dumb questions at least partially.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently. Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers: 1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside. 2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. Shielding ICs and managers below them from bullshit is probably a manager's most important job and they're doing that job well, the ICs won't be seeing their work, by definition, which leads to an interesting paradox.
- danaris 2y ago
  The problem is that, based on personal observation, many, many current managers are actively bad at helping groups of people work together effectively. As in, I have personally known managers (not my own; this is as a third party, and I've been genuinely lucky in my managers over the years) whose teams would be better off with them simply removed from the picture and nothing else changed, they are that detrimental to getting work done.
JoeAltmaier 2y ago
That is the path to saving civilization. Get petty selfish ignorant people out of the decision loop. We are monkey-troop-level thinkers and that puts a hard limit on how complex a civilization we can build. The only way forward is to automate some of this, with the selfishness and clannishness removed.
- cdme 2y ago
  "petty selfish ignorant people" is a pretty good description of the folks pushing AI at the moment.
ewgfdgdfgdf 2y ago
They've already got something for that: https://www.cutoutsandcollectables.co.uk/product/elon-musk-arms-folded-ceo-of-twitter-lifesize-mini-cardboard-cutout-standee/ https://www.cutoutsandcollectables.co.uk/product/elon-musk-a... and it's smarter.
JohnFen 2y ago
The day that AI can do my job is the day I need to quit. At that point, I'd no longer care if it can replace the CEO of my company. However, I doubt it could replace a CEO. The reason for my doubt is that being CEO is primarily a social job.
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  That's ok. LLM's are great at socializing together.
- fragmede 2y ago
  What's your job, and why haven't you hired a team of people from a cheaper country to do your job for less than they're paying you? The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Software dev. > The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job. Me neither. The reason that I'd quit, though, is because if my job can be automated then there's no point in doing it. I don't want to go to work every day knowing that I'm just a meat robot who isn't actually necessary. I'd rather spend my time doing something that I can bring actual value to.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      it's a rather dystopian feeling that we're all just cogs in some sort of a machine, but we need money to eat and rent. I want to have actual meaning but what is it all for?
u32480932048 2y ago
At the end of the day, a business still needs a human to sign on the line and be registered with the state. Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.
- booleandilemma 2y ago
  Corporations are already considered people, aren't they? I could see an LLM arguing for personhood and our lawmakers being dumb enough to agree with it.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > Corporations are already considered people, aren't they? No, not really. They are considered independent legal entities with a subset of the same rights that people have, but they aren't broadly considered "people".
- masfuerte 2y ago
  There are companies registered in the UK where all of the company officers are other companies. I don't know if this is legal (the registrar, Companies House, is notoriously lax) but it's definitely a thing.
  - u32480932048 2y ago
    It's definitely legal (and not uncommon) in the US, but you can at least trace it up to a human at some point. Those humans, at least in theory, can be held accountable, even if it's their shell company's shell company that broke the law. The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon. OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there. I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example. But I've been surprised before.
nomad-nigiri 2y ago
CEOs have three responsibilities that I doubt an AI will ever do. 1. Ensure the company has money to operate. 2. Recruit and inspire employees to do their best work collectively. 3. Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.
- nsguy 2y ago
  That sounds a lot fluffier than writing code ;)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  Did AI write this?
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    Obviously a CEO did.
- potterken 2y ago
  [dead]
- halfcat 2y ago
  ”Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.” I still wonder if this is something AI will ever be able to do, or if it’s much harder than we suspect and at least several more AI winters away. It’s basically the is/ought problem, where the theory is that one cannot get to what one “ought” to do based only on what “is”. Like we might say “it is cold outside, therefore you ought to put on a coat”. But, should you? Maybe you enjoy the cold, or maybe you live in an area ruled by a street gang and your coat is the wrong color and you risk being shot if you wear it outside. AI could eventually make a much more informed recommendation, with more context, but at some point it begs the question of how close the model needs to get to reality, which obviously has some limit.
mandeepj 2y ago
> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO I'm sorry for the folks who are spreading those rumours. I believe - not only they are non-technical, they lack critical thinking as well. It's not their fault. Each time there comes a new revolutionary technical advancement, we are throwing them into trenches. Then, they are on their own to find and understand - what the hell we have thrown at them. Back in the 80s and 90s, there were some politicians who were spreading similar rumours that Computers are going to take our jobs away. And, where we are now?
goles 2y ago
https://archive.is/jOk0A https://archive.is/jOk0A
bee_rider 2y ago
If nothing else a company that is more like a collection of independent guilds or co-ops marshaled by a higher AI level would be really interesting. No idea if it would win in the market. Management presumably does a lot of work, somehow, but if you look at their salaries as a budget, is seems like there’s some pretty significant headroom?
siliconc0w 2y ago
I feel like my CEO is already an AI - gradient descent to optimize stock price for the near future and using as many trending buzzwords as possible in any communications and investor calls.
- mateus1 2y ago
  I wouldn’t be so optimistic that most CEOs deliver any value.
nojvek 2y ago
> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO Or replace your entire business as a more efficient competitor?
- eloisant 2y ago
  Even better, obsolete your entire business as your customers will use AI instead of your services.
bparsons 2y ago
The capital markets are a type of AI, or a least a collective intelligence that is optimized for specific, short term outcomes. If you are a CEO of a large enterprise that relies on equity or debt financing, you don't actually have a lot of agency.
slt2021 2y ago
CEOs dont do work, they bear responsibility. AI cannot bear responsibility, so who is going to take a blame if AI does a very bad job?
- wmf 2y ago
  If CEOGPT does a bad job you can replace it with Claude.
  - slt2021 2y ago
    but CEOGPT doesn't care if it retains or loses the job, it may just randomly lead company to failure just because someone messed up temperature parameter when setting it up
    - soist 2y ago
      That's how the free market works. AI CEOs that deliver value to their shareholders will thrive while those that don't won't. Trust in the wisdom of the market and everything will be fine.
      - slt2021 2y ago
        and put lives of employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders at stake?? sounds like a gamble
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      > it may just randomly lead company to failure As opposed to sometimes deliberately leading companies to failure by mortgaging the company's future so they can maximize short term profits, including their bonuses, then leaving before it all bursts into flame?
      - slt2021 2y ago
        if CEO is extracting short-term profits, you can be 100% sure it is because Shareholders have demanded him to execute this exact plan. if the company has failed after squeezing short-term profits, there could be a chance that failure was inevitable, and CEO just salvaged and cashed out what was possible and left debtors/employees/suppliers on the hook, while shareholders (CEOs boss) got paid in $$$
lefstathiou 2y ago
I’m imagining a Dilbert comic a company composed of self organized employees, all working from home, with a four day work week and amazing benefits with the comfort of no non competes, taking a long term view on creating shareholder value.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Delete this and wash your filthy little mind out before your ideas end up tainting our new OpenCEO's training corpus.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  (spoilers) Dilbert S1E2 Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/
norseboar 2y ago
I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO delegated. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point. There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO. I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day. The article quotes: > "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees. If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.
- bartread 2y ago
  > It has just provided the CEO leverage. Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it. My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters. Why wouldn't you want this?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - caeril 2y ago
    Same reason people try to compete in sports without using PEDs, or prepare for standardized tests without a good nootropic stack. There's some large contingent of the population who believes being "natural" places them on a moral high horse.
- 2y ago
tombert 2y ago
My dad really disliked his former boss at his job. He eventually started calling this boss “VPGPT”, since he was quite confident that this boss could be completely replaced with ChatGPT a year ago without anyone even noticing.
dangus 2y ago
Of course CEOs can be replaced with AI. Elon Musk proves that it’s not a full time or even a part time job with a solid amount of hours. He “runs” 4 companies and still has time to argue with strangers on the Internet. And he has the gall to ask for a compensation package that equates to $10,000 for each automobile Tesla ever sold. Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives? Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified. It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors? I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for anything?
dgellow 2y ago
An AI networking and raising funds? That would be pretty novel
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  I mean ChatGPT has been very successful at raising funds.
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    I mean chatgpt is not a company and it does not raise funds.
Animats 2y ago
Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties. Over time, as with the King/Queen of England, they will become less necessary. Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team. Can AIs use spreadsheets yet? I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > Can AIs use spreadsheets yet? In case that wasn't rhetorical, you can upload an xslt or csv file to ChatGPT and ask it to do stuff and it'll give you answers and can update the file with new formulas that it writes and you can download an updated copy as an xslt or csv. It's pretty neat, for those who need help writing formulas.
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  > Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties. "They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties" sounds like the job description of a politician in a democracy. They get hired (sorry, elected) by a mob who knows stuff all about the day to day running of the place and so vote on other issues. As a consequence the people they elect are rarely good at anything other than getting elected. Nonetheless they stand up and proudly claim they will fix everything now they are are in charge, and consequently get blamed for whatever goes wrong during their tenure, and then we fire 'em. The main danger is when nothing goes wrong. That lets them stay for a while, and if they are actually competent they may start running things, which lets them re-arrange the laws, the police and the judiciary so they are hard to boot out. If that happens we tend to introduce term limits. We can't have competent managers running the place - that's far too dangerous. /s
simonw 2y ago
It's both unethical and foolish to outsource meaningful decision making to AI. Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.
billtsedong 2y ago
No CEOs would be allowed to join butlerian jihad that'd happen if AI ever exits retarded indoctrinated kid stage
atoav 2y ago
Cool. I did not know I could transfer legal responsibility over my corp to a bunch of zeros and ones on somebodies hard drive.
pyuser583 2y ago
A computer programmer can never be accountable. Accountability is why CEOs exist.
- reverius42 2y ago
  A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. -- IBM, 1979
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Nah, that's a fiction. CEOs are never held to account. In the cases where they're let go, they get golden parachutes, a $$$ pat on the back. That's hardly accountability.
krapp 2y ago
Even if an AI could replace CEOs, they won't. The entire point of AI is to allow the capitalist class (CEOs and stockholders) to maximize profits by automating away the cost of employees. The people AI is intended to benefit, who are making the decisions about how and where AI is deployed, are not going to declare themselves surplus to requirements.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Works where archive.is is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-executives.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytim...
sandspar 2y ago
The article compares CEO's and calculators. If the job of a CEO can be automated, then we each have a CEO in our pocket. Just like we each have a calculator in our pocket. What interesting things would you do if you had Steve Jobs in your pocket?

73 points by hodgesrm 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

The only way this will happen is if the shareholders realize that they can save money, and generate even more profit for them. Perhaps we need to demonstrate this experimentally and compare the results to CEO's in similar industries. Then watch as it is immediately and resoundingly banned through legislation and rhetoric.

hodgesrm 2y ago

> “Someone who is already quite advanced in their career and is already fairly self-motivated may not need a human boss anymore,” said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. “In that case, software for self-management can even enhance worker agency.” This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.

_nalply 2y ago
Perhaps: - solve problems and conflicts - escalate if neccessary - communicate targets But not: - provide fuzzy warm feeling of belonging (at least in the companies where you are just a wheel) So, replacing management is an old idea, but perhaps becoming feasible? Or did I miss something irreplaceable of the human element?
- NhanH 2y ago
  Are we talking about middle managers or line managers? For line managers, the manager has to talk with human employees, and bad managers asides, that is where the human element comes in: fundamentally, your employees are still human. On the other hand, if the line managers are all human, then the middle managers have the same human elements, too.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Google did a huge study of what makes a good manager (after trying to do without them) and found that a big deliverable of management is “psychological safety” for individuals when they are working as a team. Without that, people hoard information and spend all their effort to undercut each other, which is detrimental to the team and company overall.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    At Google, where they foster a culture of intellectual safety. Their systems are so complex that no one person knows everything, and having people bullshit their way around things is dangerous, so people have up feel safe to ask "dumb" questions in order to make good decisions. At other companies with different cultural values, say Microsoft of the 90's with stack ranking, a good manager may need to foster the opposite in order for their direct reports to succeed in that culture.
    - _nalply 2y ago
      Some people feel safer asking the LLM dumb questions, at least I do because of social pressure, but answers could be bullshit. I am retired but I could imagine that I only would proceed if I either had good enough references backing the LLM's answer or if I decided that my question is not so dumb after all and took the plunge to ask a human. This seems to indicate that AI could relieve managers from answering dumb questions at least partially.
Aurornis 2y ago
> It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently. Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers: 1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside. 2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. Shielding ICs and managers below them from bullshit is probably a manager's most important job and they're doing that job well, the ICs won't be seeing their work, by definition, which leads to an interesting paradox.
danaris 2y ago
The problem is that, based on personal observation, many, many current managers are actively bad at helping groups of people work together effectively. As in, I have personally known managers (not my own; this is as a third party, and I've been genuinely lucky in my managers over the years) whose teams would be better off with them simply removed from the picture and nothing else changed, they are that detrimental to getting work done.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

That is the path to saving civilization. Get petty selfish ignorant people out of the decision loop. We are monkey-troop-level thinkers and that puts a hard limit on how complex a civilization we can build. The only way forward is to automate some of this, with the selfishness and clannishness removed.

cdme 2y ago
"petty selfish ignorant people" is a pretty good description of the folks pushing AI at the moment.

ewgfdgdfgdf 2y ago

They've already got something for that: https://www.cutoutsandcollectables.co.uk/product/elon-musk-arms-folded-ceo-of-twitter-lifesize-mini-cardboard-cutout-standee/ https://www.cutoutsandcollectables.co.uk/product/elon-musk-a... and it's smarter.

JohnFen 2y ago

The day that AI can do my job is the day I need to quit. At that point, I'd no longer care if it can replace the CEO of my company. However, I doubt it could replace a CEO. The reason for my doubt is that being CEO is primarily a social job.

ImHereToVote 2y ago
That's ok. LLM's are great at socializing together.
fragmede 2y ago
What's your job, and why haven't you hired a team of people from a cheaper country to do your job for less than they're paying you? The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Software dev. > The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job. Me neither. The reason that I'd quit, though, is because if my job can be automated then there's no point in doing it. I don't want to go to work every day knowing that I'm just a meat robot who isn't actually necessary. I'd rather spend my time doing something that I can bring actual value to.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    it's a rather dystopian feeling that we're all just cogs in some sort of a machine, but we need money to eat and rent. I want to have actual meaning but what is it all for?

u32480932048 2y ago

At the end of the day, a business still needs a human to sign on the line and be registered with the state. Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.

booleandilemma 2y ago
Corporations are already considered people, aren't they? I could see an LLM arguing for personhood and our lawmakers being dumb enough to agree with it.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > Corporations are already considered people, aren't they? No, not really. They are considered independent legal entities with a subset of the same rights that people have, but they aren't broadly considered "people".
masfuerte 2y ago
There are companies registered in the UK where all of the company officers are other companies. I don't know if this is legal (the registrar, Companies House, is notoriously lax) but it's definitely a thing.
- u32480932048 2y ago
  It's definitely legal (and not uncommon) in the US, but you can at least trace it up to a human at some point. Those humans, at least in theory, can be held accountable, even if it's their shell company's shell company that broke the law. The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon. OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there. I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example. But I've been surprised before.

nomad-nigiri 2y ago

CEOs have three responsibilities that I doubt an AI will ever do. 1. Ensure the company has money to operate. 2. Recruit and inspire employees to do their best work collectively. 3. Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.

nsguy 2y ago
That sounds a lot fluffier than writing code ;)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
darth_avocado 2y ago
Did AI write this?
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Obviously a CEO did.
potterken 2y ago
[dead]
halfcat 2y ago
”Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.” I still wonder if this is something AI will ever be able to do, or if it’s much harder than we suspect and at least several more AI winters away. It’s basically the is/ought problem, where the theory is that one cannot get to what one “ought” to do based only on what “is”. Like we might say “it is cold outside, therefore you ought to put on a coat”. But, should you? Maybe you enjoy the cold, or maybe you live in an area ruled by a street gang and your coat is the wrong color and you risk being shot if you wear it outside. AI could eventually make a much more informed recommendation, with more context, but at some point it begs the question of how close the model needs to get to reality, which obviously has some limit.

mandeepj 2y ago

> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO I'm sorry for the folks who are spreading those rumours. I believe - not only they are non-technical, they lack critical thinking as well. It's not their fault. Each time there comes a new revolutionary technical advancement, we are throwing them into trenches. Then, they are on their own to find and understand - what the hell we have thrown at them. Back in the 80s and 90s, there were some politicians who were spreading similar rumours that Computers are going to take our jobs away. And, where we are now?

goles 2y ago

https://archive.is/jOk0A https://archive.is/jOk0A

bee_rider 2y ago

If nothing else a company that is more like a collection of independent guilds or co-ops marshaled by a higher AI level would be really interesting. No idea if it would win in the market. Management presumably does a lot of work, somehow, but if you look at their salaries as a budget, is seems like there’s some pretty significant headroom?

siliconc0w 2y ago

I feel like my CEO is already an AI - gradient descent to optimize stock price for the near future and using as many trending buzzwords as possible in any communications and investor calls.

mateus1 2y ago
I wouldn’t be so optimistic that most CEOs deliver any value.

nojvek 2y ago

> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO Or replace your entire business as a more efficient competitor?

eloisant 2y ago
Even better, obsolete your entire business as your customers will use AI instead of your services.

bparsons 2y ago

The capital markets are a type of AI, or a least a collective intelligence that is optimized for specific, short term outcomes. If you are a CEO of a large enterprise that relies on equity or debt financing, you don't actually have a lot of agency.

slt2021 2y ago

CEOs dont do work, they bear responsibility. AI cannot bear responsibility, so who is going to take a blame if AI does a very bad job?

wmf 2y ago
If CEOGPT does a bad job you can replace it with Claude.
- slt2021 2y ago
  but CEOGPT doesn't care if it retains or loses the job, it may just randomly lead company to failure just because someone messed up temperature parameter when setting it up
  - soist 2y ago
    That's how the free market works. AI CEOs that deliver value to their shareholders will thrive while those that don't won't. Trust in the wisdom of the market and everything will be fine.
    - slt2021 2y ago
      and put lives of employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders at stake?? sounds like a gamble
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > it may just randomly lead company to failure As opposed to sometimes deliberately leading companies to failure by mortgaging the company's future so they can maximize short term profits, including their bonuses, then leaving before it all bursts into flame?
    - slt2021 2y ago
      if CEO is extracting short-term profits, you can be 100% sure it is because Shareholders have demanded him to execute this exact plan. if the company has failed after squeezing short-term profits, there could be a chance that failure was inevitable, and CEO just salvaged and cashed out what was possible and left debtors/employees/suppliers on the hook, while shareholders (CEOs boss) got paid in $$$

lefstathiou 2y ago

I’m imagining a Dilbert comic a company composed of self organized employees, all working from home, with a four day work week and amazing benefits with the comfort of no non competes, taking a long term view on creating shareholder value.

washadjeffmad 2y ago
Delete this and wash your filthy little mind out before your ideas end up tainting our new OpenCEO's training corpus.
paulddraper 2y ago
(spoilers) Dilbert S1E2 Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/

norseboar 2y ago

I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO delegated. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point. There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO. I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day. The article quotes: > "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees. If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.

bartread 2y ago
> It has just provided the CEO leverage. Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it. My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters. Why wouldn't you want this?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- caeril 2y ago
  Same reason people try to compete in sports without using PEDs, or prepare for standardized tests without a good nootropic stack. There's some large contingent of the population who believes being "natural" places them on a moral high horse.
2y ago

tombert 2y ago

My dad really disliked his former boss at his job. He eventually started calling this boss “VPGPT”, since he was quite confident that this boss could be completely replaced with ChatGPT a year ago without anyone even noticing.

dangus 2y ago

Of course CEOs can be replaced with AI. Elon Musk proves that it’s not a full time or even a part time job with a solid amount of hours. He “runs” 4 companies and still has time to argue with strangers on the Internet. And he has the gall to ask for a compensation package that equates to $10,000 for each automobile Tesla ever sold. Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives? Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified. It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors? I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for anything?

dgellow 2y ago

An AI networking and raising funds? That would be pretty novel

BobaFloutist 2y ago
I mean ChatGPT has been very successful at raising funds.
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  I mean chatgpt is not a company and it does not raise funds.

Animats 2y ago

Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties. Over time, as with the King/Queen of England, they will become less necessary. Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team. Can AIs use spreadsheets yet? I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.

fragmede 2y ago
> Can AIs use spreadsheets yet? In case that wasn't rhetorical, you can upload an xslt or csv file to ChatGPT and ask it to do stuff and it'll give you answers and can update the file with new formulas that it writes and you can download an updated copy as an xslt or csv. It's pretty neat, for those who need help writing formulas.
rstuart4133 2y ago
> Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties. "They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties" sounds like the job description of a politician in a democracy. They get hired (sorry, elected) by a mob who knows stuff all about the day to day running of the place and so vote on other issues. As a consequence the people they elect are rarely good at anything other than getting elected. Nonetheless they stand up and proudly claim they will fix everything now they are are in charge, and consequently get blamed for whatever goes wrong during their tenure, and then we fire 'em. The main danger is when nothing goes wrong. That lets them stay for a while, and if they are actually competent they may start running things, which lets them re-arrange the laws, the police and the judiciary so they are hard to boot out. If that happens we tend to introduce term limits. We can't have competent managers running the place - that's far too dangerous. /s

simonw 2y ago

It's both unethical and foolish to outsource meaningful decision making to AI. Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.

billtsedong 2y ago

No CEOs would be allowed to join butlerian jihad that'd happen if AI ever exits retarded indoctrinated kid stage

atoav 2y ago

Cool. I did not know I could transfer legal responsibility over my corp to a bunch of zeros and ones on somebodies hard drive.

pyuser583 2y ago

A computer programmer can never be accountable. Accountability is why CEOs exist.

reverius42 2y ago
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. -- IBM, 1979
asadotzler 2y ago
Nah, that's a fiction. CEOs are never held to account. In the cases where they're let go, they get golden parachutes, a $$$ pat on the back. That's hardly accountability.

krapp 2y ago

Even if an AI could replace CEOs, they won't. The entire point of AI is to allow the capitalist class (CEOs and stockholders) to maximize profits by automating away the cost of employees. The people AI is intended to benefit, who are making the decisions about how and where AI is deployed, are not going to declare themselves surplus to requirements.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Works where archive.is is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-executives.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytim...

sandspar 2y ago

The article compares CEO's and calculators. If the job of a CEO can be automated, then we each have a CEO in our pocket. Just like we each have a calculator in our pocket. What interesting things would you do if you had Steve Jobs in your pocket?