11 ms·
CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them? (2021)
- chasil 10mo agohttps://archive.ph/uiRyN https://archive.ph/uiRyN
- xyzzy123 10mo agoBecause the people supplying the automation would extract the surplus that otherwise goes to the ceo?
- jojobas 10mo agoIf there's competition they'll race each other to costs+overhead.
- xyzzy123 10mo agoWhat is the difference that explains why this doesn't seem to happen for humans in the ceo role, but would happen if the role were fulfilled by automation?
- tbrownaw 10mo agoMostly the massive supply increase that automation always brings.
- xyzzy123 10mo agoI'm not sure you can get around the principal-agent problem that easily. Who sets the policy levers on the automation and governs it? They inherit the ceo's negotiating leverage with shareholders. It seems like you'd need some sort of fairly radical control structure (say, no board, just ai interacting directly with shareholders) to get around this. But even this ignores that the automation is not neutral, it is provided by actors with incentives.
- hsbauauvhabzb 10mo agoThis. The enshittification doesn’t happen until later, at which point it’s too late to fix.
- gruez 10mo agoSince when did people support CEOs as some sort of jobs or redistribution program? It's at least somewhat plausible to mandate bullshit jobs like gas station attendants or whatever to keep teenagers employed, but nobody is clamoring for CEOs to exist to screw over shareholders.
- xyzzy123 10mo agoI didn't mean it as a moral statement, but as a practical observation that a person with effective control over a company has a lot of leverage when it comes to negotiating resource splits. Also, you want them to be aligned.
- llmslave2 10mo agoImagine an AI agent that ingests a ton of data from business analytics and then makes decisions, which are signed off by the company legal team. Could be good, but could also be bad if it turns out the AI is able to be even more ruthless in how it treats its workforce. The good news is that it doesn't need to be very accurate in order to beat the performance of most execs anyways.
- pharos92 10mo agoLegal team? Why not another AI.
- Muromec 10mo agoWell, somebody has to go to jail if catastrophic decisions are made and you can't jail AI. We very often see CEOs being jailed in the real world, so the pay is actually a very fair compensation for the risk.
- jojobas 10mo agoYou hire a bum for 6 figures to rubberstamp things with a slight risk of going to jail.
- lijok 10mo agoIn violation of a comical number of laws
- SoftTalker 10mo ago> We very often see CEOs being jailed in the real world Where "very often" means "almost never?"
- mslt 10mo agoThis is the actual answer to the whole question - accountability
- pxtail 10mo agoBecause being CEO in huge part means having connections with the right people.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 10mo agoAs if AI doesn't have connections with people.
- 1270018080 10mo agoOther than people hallucinating relationships with a stream of text, not really.
- treebeard901 10mo agoBuild an AI that can play golf and bribe Government officials. Problem solved.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cryptica 10mo agoIf it can engage in criminal activity, then it can skip the golf training. Every time the LLM CEO gets caught doing a crime and goes to 'jail', the LLMs on the exec board can vote to replace it with another instance of the same LLM model. Forget 'limited liability', this is 'no liability'.
- morkalork 10mo agoDo AIs have a rolodex of other executives, board members, alumni and frat buddies they've worked with or spent years exchanging with?
- leptons 10mo agoI'm not sure you understood what "connections" means in this context.
- Vaslo 10mo agoShould say,”Soft skills are hugely expensive. Why not automate them?” Then you don’t need to read the article.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ur-whale 10mo ago> Why not automate them? Because building psychopathic AI's is - at the moment - still frowned upon.
- bdangubic 10mo agonot everywhere :)
- hsbauauvhabzb 10mo agoIt’s cute that you think major AIs aren’t psychopathic. I wish I had your optimism.
- Bender 10mo agoCEO's at least in the USA have multiple legal obligations under federal law. Can legal obligations be delegated legally to automation? Has this been tested yet, specific to legal obligations related to the board? Any corporate lawyers wish to chime in?
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> CEO's at least in the USA have multiple legal obligations under federal law. Lots of people have legal obligations. In this case, I assume that in this case you're referring to a fiduciary duty (i.e. to act in the best interests of the company), which is typically held not by the CEO, but but by the directors. Ultimately the responsibility to assign daily operation of the company rests with the board, both legally and practically, as does the decision to use a human or AI CEO.
- GoatInGrey 10mo agoUnder Delaware law (where most U.S. public companies incorporate), directors' fiduciary duties are non-delegable. The actual exercise of judgment must be performed by the director, who must be a "natural person". Other jurisdictions might offer grey areas, but good luck finding one that meaningfully changes this. More practically, legal accountability would be placed in the individuals approving LLMs actions and/or the entity providing the LLM service. The latter aspect being why many AI vendor deals fall through. Because everything is awesome until the contract comes and the vendor wants to take no responsibility for anything that results from their product.
- Digit-Al 10mo agoThis should be marked as being from 2023.
- bawolff 10mo agoBecause despite appearences, being a CEO is an actual complex job that AI is not remotely competitive at
- goku12 10mo agoConsidering that these CEOs are talking about replacing all skilled and unskilled labor under them with LLMs, I don't see why they can't be replaced too. In reality, LLMs are overhyped. Even Grok says it straight - LLMs are probability models with condensed human knowledge that decides what the next word/letter should be. Original thoughts isn't its forte. (Surprisingly though, that's enough for them to recognize that you're a human. Their models can identify your complex thought progression in your prompts - no matter how robotic your language is.) The REAL problem here is the hideous narrative some of these CEOs spin. They swing the LLMs around to convince everyone that they are replaceable, thereby crashing the value of the job market and increasing their own profits. At the same time, they project themselves as some sort of super-intelligent divine beings with special abilities without which the world will not progress, while in reality they maintain an exclusive club of wealthy connections that they guard jealously by ruining the opportunities for the others (the proverbial 'burning the ladder behind them'.) They use their PR resources to paint a larger-than-life image that hides the extreme destruction they leave behind in the pursuit of wealth - like hiding a hideous odor with bucketfuls of perfume. These two problems are the two sides of a coin that expose their duplicity and deception. PS: I have to say that this doesn't apply to all CEOs. There are plenty of skilled CEOs, especially founders, who play a huge role in setting the company up. Here I'm talking about the stereotypical cosmopolitan bunch that comes to our mind when we hear that word. The ones who have no qualms in destroying the world for their enjoyment and look down upon normal people as if you're just fodder for them.
- spicyusername 10mo agoI can't think of a job that is less automatable. The entire job is almost entirely human to human tasks: the salesmanship of selling a vision, networking within and without the company, leading the first and second line executives, collaborating with the board, etc. What are people thinking CEOs do all day? The "work" work is done by their subordinates. Their job is basically nothing but social finesse.
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> The entire job is almost entirely human to human tasks: sales, networking, leading, etc. So, writing emails? "Hey, ChatGPT. Write a business strategy for our widget company. Then, draft emails to each department with instructions for implementing that strategy." There, I just saved you $20 million.
- collingreen 10mo agoI get your point but if you think that list of critical functions (or the unlisted "good ol boys" style tasks) boils down to some emails then I think you don't have an appreciation for the work or finesse or charisma required.
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> I think you don't have an appreciation for the work or finesse or charisma required. I think that you don't appreciate that charismatic emails are one of the few things that modern AI can do better than humans. I wouldn't trust ChatGPT to do my math homework, but I would trust it to write a great op-ed piece.
- s1artibartfast 10mo agoFor some reason the AI prompt "make me 20 million" hasn't been working for me. What am I doing wrong?
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- samuelknight 10mo agoYou're Absolutely Right!
- andy99 10mo agoIf you’ve ever taken a sales or business or networking course, and seen the people that take the advice literally and act like creepy wooden weirdos, you know why. Business “skill” is intangible, partially luck obviously but partially “game” that you can’t just systematize. It’s the same reason you can’t automate sales. An AI ceo would just be the composite of all the lame business advice you find on the internet - like a lot of wannabe CEOs that also don’t succeed. You might as well ask why people don’t use AI pickup coaches.
- vittore 10mo agoWell, but they do.
- gchamonlive 10mo agoTo catastrophic effects, invariably.
- Zigurd 10mo agoYou meant that totally unironically?
- gchamonlive 10mo agoHow could AI coaches be successful?
- Zigurd 10mo agoSo Reiki masters and fortune tellers are safe from being automated, too?
- monocasa 10mo agoI actually know a non zero amount of people that are using chatgpt to interpret their tarot card readings.
- IAmGraydon 10mo agoAnother article that starts from the false premise that AI is intelligent.
- skeptrune 10mo agoShould have (2023) in the title. This is an old post. Also, I think it misses the critical point. C-suite executives operate under immense pressure to deliver abstract business outcomes, but the lack of clear, immediate feedback loops and well-defined success metrics makes their roles resistant to automation. AI needs concrete reward functions that executive decision-making simply doesn't provide.
- goalieca 10mo agoAI can’t even clean toilets.
- hackyhacky 10mo agoNeither can CEOs. What's your point?
- goalieca 10mo agoThey can. AI can’t automate anything.
- biophysboy 10mo agoChristine Carrillo's most recent company helps CEOs find executive assistants. So she had her executive assistant find executive assistants... sigh...
- troglo-byte 10mo agoThe article might be a modest proposal [1], but sooner or later we're going to have to answer questions like these. An even more interesting one is: What will we reward? We've been rewarding labor quantity, as well as quality via higher wages - as motivation and as incentives for more education. This reflected the productivity primacy of knowledge work in modern economies, but that might not be the case down the road. We've also been rewarding capital. Originally this was a way for the elites to keep themselves in place (a.k.a. economic rents), but in modern times it's been more of an entrepreneurial incentive (a.k.a. economic profits.) Without the economic profit rationale, there's no reason to reward capital accumulation. Only pro-profit decisions are good for society, pro-rent decisions are awful. If there's no profit to incentivize, capitalism is just bad all around. If AI becomes a better profit decision-maker than an entrepreneur, any humans left in the loop are nothing but high-rollers gambling with everyone else's money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
- lurk2 10mo agoInane Reddit crosspost.
- tbrownaw 10mo agoMaybe first get the automated vending machines to work properly, and then revisit this question to find what tasks that allows to be peeled away from the role?
- seg_lol 10mo agoYou know those puff pieces are to assuage our fears of job loss and provide an folksy aww-sucks patina to the plucky LLM who can't run a vending machine.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoOr maybe that LLMs just aren't that good.
- lux-lux-lux 10mo agoAutomated vending machines have been a thing since their inception, definitionally.
- xigoi 10mo agoVending machines run by an LLM have not been a thing until recently.
- Bluescreenbuddy 10mo agoVending machines are static experiences. They sit there and wait until told to give an item and paid for it. Why would you need an LLM for that? There’s nothing to solve there
- qcnguy 10mo agoThe comment is a reference to a well known benchmark in which LLMs inevitably lose money attempting to run a simple simulated vending machine business.
- tombert 10mo agoI don't even think we need ChatGPT or anything for this. Instead, just create an n8n job that runs nightly that sends a company-wide email that says "we are continuing to strive to implement AI into our application". Maybe add a thing talking about how share price going down is actually a blessing in disguise, depending on how the market is doing, obviously. Don't steal this idea it's mine I'm going to sell it for a million dollars.
- VladVladikoff 10mo agoI must be a weird CEO because I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to explain to people why shoving AI into our application will only make it worse not better.
- tombert 10mo agoSome CEOs are better than others, but I think a lot of CEOs, especially for BigCos, don't really know what's actually happening in their company so instead of actually contributing to anything, they just defer to buzzwords that they think the shareholders want to hear.
- sallveburrpi 10mo agoThe people in this thread coming to the defense of their CEOs sound like Tom Smykowski in Office Space desperately trying to save his job: “I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people.” https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
- viraptor 10mo agoI don't get what you mean. There are people who are great at bridging the customer-engineering gap. (Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers) There's skill to that kind of position. Bobs were the stereotypical consultants brought in to change things and cut costs without understanding the actual work. What does this have to do with defending CEOs?
- whstl 10mo ago> Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers The movie makes it quite clear, actually. The Bobs were actually way better than the stereotypical layoff consultants. They even caught on the crazy management chain and the busywork generated by TPS reports. Sure they wanted to layoff good engineers, but doesn't invalidate the actual good findings.
- viraptor 10mo ago> The movie makes it quite clear, actually. Did we ever see him interacting with a customer? I don't remember that part and I can't find any clip of it. We see him in many other situations. We know he was not respected and was a weirdo in many ways, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of his customer communication.
- sallveburrpi 10mo agoHe admits himself he isn’t actually the one communicating with the customer, it’s his secretary
- jalapenos 10mo agoMisunderstanding why the CEO is paid so much. If you've ever worked at a company that's a chaotic shitshow, you'll know how strong the effect of the CEO is - it always comes down to the guy at the top not being up to it. The leverage of the role is enormous, and the strength of someone who can carry out this role well for a large company is sky high - not many such people in the world, and they only need one. So the math all comes out very straightforward: even at obscene looking salaries, they're still a bargain.
- mvkel 10mo agoI was a CEO for thirteen years. For the hard CEO skills, AI is perfectly suited for the job; even more than it would be for specialist roles. For the soft CEO skills, not so much. Not that that's a deal-breaker. I have a vision of an AI CEO couched as a "strategic thought partner," which the wet-CEO just puppets to grease the skids of acceptance among the employees. I'd fully trust an AI CEO's decision making, for a predictable business, at least. But some CEOs get paid a lot (deservedly so) because they can make the right decisions in the thick fog of war. Hard to get an AI to make the right decision on something that wasn't in the training corpus. Still, business strategy isn't as complex as picking winners in the stock market.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoI’d suspect that an AI CEO would have to complement its weaknesses — just like any CEO. And in this case, rely on subordinates for glad-handing and vision pitches, while itself focusing on coordinating them, staging them to the right meetings, coordinating between departments, etc. I think an AI could be strong at a few skills, if appropriately chosen: - being gaslightingly polite while firmly telling others no; - doing a good job of compressing company wide news into short, layperson summaries for investors and the public; - making PR statements, shareholder calls, etc; and, - dealing with the deluge of meetings and emails to keep its subordinates rowing in the same direction. Would it require that we have staff support some of the traditional soft skills? Absolutely. But there’s nothing fundamentally stopping an AI CEO from running the company.
- mvkel 10mo agoOne massive bullet that is missing that is worth more than the other things combined: synthesizing all company data and developing a cohesive strategy that achieves some stated long term vision. There is no shortage of data a company has at its disposal these days and a CEO will bias towards what they feel they are best at. We see that with Steve Jobs versus Tim Cook. Tim loves seeing numbers go up into the right, so that's where the passion is in the company these days. An AI CEO that could not only balance that out but cancel it out could be a real strength. The human ceo would still be indispensable in setting the company vision, and defining its culture and values; crucial ingredients for execution.
- shmerl 10mo agoThis one? https://replaceyourboss.ai https://replaceyourboss.ai
- diydsp 10mo agoLove the idea, but whence the training data? Not as readily available as billions of jpegs, lines of code, and audio files. Any clever ideas to source it?
- Zigurd 10mo agoYou could replace all of the arguments against automating CEOs with the same arguments against automating allocation of capital. In both these cases people are imagining their work to be more subtle and ineluctably human than, for example, the work of doctors and lawyers. Sure, buddy. Keep telling yourself.
- gdulli 10mo agoYou say that like we've already done away with human doctors and lawyers. Lawyers can't even use LLMs as an aid without them making up fake citations. The technology isn't close to being able to be used unsupervised, and humans are proving too irresponsible to supervise it.
- eucryphia 10mo agoAnd replace them with government bureaucrats? It’s been tried before, it didn’t work out well.
- cantalopes 10mo agoCan't read the paywalled article so i'm judginf from just a headline (not sure if it's sarcasm or actual opinion), but as someone who has the honor of working witha really good ceo i can definitely say that you cannot automate them. maybe in some streamlined corporate machine like ibm or something, but not in a living growing company
- Zak 10mo agoMy impression is that most of the value a CEO provides comes from a combination of their existing social network and their ability to interface socially with other companies. The day to day work described in the article is not where the value comes from. It would be an interesting experiment to promote an executive assistant to CEO though.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- daft_pink 10mo agoWe just posted a memorial for Louis Gerstner, the CEO that turned around IBM. I think reading about Louis Gerstner gives a pretty good example of why this would be a bad idea. My business experience is that company culture is very important to a company’s success and I’m just doubtful that this can be created through AI.
- waffleiron 10mo agoThat could be survival bias and smells of a multiple testing problem. Surely there would also be a few automated systems to that sometimes would be able to turn around a company.
- GoatInGrey 10mo agoLLM CEOs would be middle of the road, I suspect. Yes, they could be much more in touch with the goings on within the business and make fewer baseless decisions. Though you would not get an innovative or culture-building leader that is necessary in some circumstances.
- jmyeet 10mo agoI'm constantly reminded about the 2000 election. Part of Al Gore's communications strategy was to constantly talk about the "top 1%". Now he wasn't wrong about this but interestingly there was a survey in 2000 that showed that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be someday. This is how successful American propaganda is. 39% of people believed something that definitionally could never be true. So you will find people who make average salaries defending the stratospheric salaries of CEOs because they believe they'll one day be the one benefitting or they've fallen for some sort of propaganda such as the myth of meritocracy or prosperity gospel. Our entire economy is designed around exploiting working people and extracting all of their wealth to a tiny portion of the population. And we're reachign the point where the bottom 50% (if not more) have nothing left to exploit. Ai and automation could be used to improve all of our lives. It isn't and it won't be. It'll be used to suppress wages and displace workers so this massive wealth transfer can be accelerated. I get the point of the article. But those with the wealth won't let themselves be replaced by AI and seemingly the populace will never ask the question of why they can't be replaced until economic conditiosn deteriorate even further.
- llmslave2 10mo ago> This is how successful American propaganda is. 39% of people believed something that definitionally could never be true. It's not that difficult to get into the top 1%. Most Americans earn a top 1% income. Even the top 1% of America is only a salary of around $500k. It's possible 19% of survey takers were in the top 1%, or were on a path to make that in the future. I don't see how it's definitionally untrue to believe you could make $500k a year at some point...Let alone $34,000 a year...
- ceejayoz 10mo ago> Most Americans earn a top 1% income. 1% of Americans earn a top 1% income. They weren't being asked "do you make more than an amputee kid in Gaza?" > It's possible 19% of survey takers were in the top 1%… There's a whole field of math devoted to preventing this. Polling works quite well, all things considered.
- mellosouls 10mo agoFor context, New Statesman is the premier British socialist magazine. Whatever the merits of the argument here (and my bolshie side has also flippantly pushed it in the past) the motivation and thrust of the essay needs to be considered in that ideological grounding.
- apsdsm 10mo agoA hundred thousand posts on HN about how you can, without hesitation, replace your network security team with AI, and you can see the flood of CEOs (or CEO wannabes) nodding and murmuring about saving costs. A single post about CEOs being automated and all of a sudden it’s all about “intangible human relation skills” and “AI couldn’t possibly” and “but my network of angel investors and other CEOs”. I swear there’s a joke or cautionary tale here somewhere about “first they came for..” or something along those lines. The phrasing escapes me. Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t automate a CEO, it’s that the actual tangible work just isn’t worth as much as some companies pay for it, and this thread it touching a few too many raw nerves. Well, either way it’s hilarious.
- llmslave2 10mo agoIt really is funny. I'm sympathetic to the idea that you can't automate the intangibles of company leadership, but that same idea also applies to other things like producing art or software, which seems to be eagerly ignored by the same cohorts who take offence to this idea.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoI too laughed when Stable Diffusion came out and artists said their jobs couldn't possible be automated due to the "intangible human creativity that machines can't replicate." I mean, it's the same thing right? At the end of the day, everyone has economic anxiety and will continue to fight to make money to survive.
- shimman 10mo agoCEOs usually follow the worse forms of human collaboration known to our species: totalitarianism, dictatorships, monarchies, and centrally planned messes. Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
- mkoubaa 10mo agoMonarchy is the best form if it's the right monarch and the worst if it isn't. Sounds about the same as CEO to me
- simonask 10mo agoHistory has yet to produce a “good” monarch (i.e. one that yields better results than the alternative, which is liberal democracy).
- mkoubaa 10mo agoWhat?? History has produced a huge amount of good monarchs. There are some around even today, for example Oman.
- simonask 10mo agoThere is no reason to believe that Oman wouldn’t do much better as a free, democratic country.
- djohnston 10mo agobetter is doing an insane amount of lifting here. In the last 30 years China has lifted more of its own people out of poverty than all democracies summed together over the same time period.
- simonask 10mo ago
- cryptica 10mo agoThere is probably a point when there is enough capital and enough investors that you don't need a CEO or executives. The investors already take care of all the politics and business networking side of the company for free. The investors can organize the government bailouts themselves. You don't need a CEO.
- Sparkle-san 10mo agoI'm deeply skeptical of CEOs being "built different" like some people are arguing here. If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous. If anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.
- boredatoms 10mo agoI think it just means he’s not the real CEO in any of them and has to have someone below actually running things
- Sparkle-san 10mo agoI mean, you're not wrong. The COO, Gwynne Shotwell, at SpaceX, is known to handle a lot of the day to day stuff, and I feel that further reinforces the point. If she can handle all of that in her role as COO then what's the point of a CEO?
- mc32 10mo agoIn many companies, probably being the main override. Trust but verify.
- prawn 10mo agoMaybe a bit like an ultimate funnel directing the broader effort of the company. That, plus brand/figurehead.
- pinkmuffinere 10mo agoHot take: Musk is a great CEO. He's a horrible person, but I feel it's undeniable that his weight behind a project greatly increases the chance of interesting and profitable things happening (despite the over-optimistic claims and missed deadlines). I think he achieves this in large part _because_ he is an asshole, tweeting all the time to drum up publicity, being notorious for doing K, being too optimistic about what can be achieved, etc. I think somebody can be a good CEO without being such a jerk, it's just that Musk doesn't take the good-person strategy. And the bad-person strategy works well for him. A CEO's job is (roughly) to maximize a company's valuation. It is not to run the company themselves, not to be nice, not to improve the world. I'm not claiming this is what _should_ be, just how it _is_. By this metric, I think Musk has done really well in his role. Edit: Tangentially related -- at the end of the musical "Hadestown", the cast raise their glasses to the audience and toast "to the world we dream about, and the one we live in today." I think about that a lot. It's so beautiful, helps enforce some realism on me, and makes me think about what I want to change with my life.
- avaer 10mo agoLast year's joke is next year's reality. Every year I feel a bit less crazy in my silly armchair speculation that the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix is a good documentary. If AI "takes over" it will be via economic means and people will go willingly until they have gradually relinquished control of the world to something alien. (Landian philosophers make the case that hyperstitional capitalism has already done this) I would take the over that this will happen sooner than later -- when it's proven to make a lot of money to have an AI CEO, suddenly everyone will change their tune and jump on the bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes, completely ignoring what they are giving up. Except unlike e.g. the metaverse/cryptocurrency bandwagon of yesteryear, there's no getting off.
- Electricniko 10mo agoCEOs who build great, long-lasting companies would be very hard to replicate. But CEOs who make money for stockholders at the expense of everything else seem like the type of thing that would be much easier to replicate. As others have commented, replacing the people skills of a CEO might be difficult. But if the CEO's job is to strip the company of assets and cash out for the owners, people skills are kind of a hindrance at that point.
- cryptica 10mo agoThe CEOs of the biggest corporations could absolutely be replaced... You don't even need an LLM, just a cron job that runs once a day and executes a script: if (marketCrash) then sendEmailToGovernmentAskingForBailout();
- mynegation 10mo agoIt is easy to make the mistake of believing CEOs are automatable based on their public speaking: interviews, earning calls, conference talks. With a rare exception (cough Musk) CEOs communicate in a very sterilized PR-speak, coached and vetted by PR, media relations, and legal counsels, and usually stick to facts or not very controversial opinions. That part of the job is pretty replaceable with a well-trained LLM. The real job is done behind the curtain. Picking up key people based on their reputation, knowledge, agency, and loyalty. Firing and laying off people. Organizational design. Cutting the losses. Making morally ambiguous decisions. Decisions based on conversations that are unlikely to ever be put into bytes.
- mplewis 10mo agoYeah, that's because business leadership is largely a cult. The way you prove your loyalty to the cult is by overseeing larger and larger layoffs ordered by those above you until you're the one putting people on the street.
- maskil 10mo agoIf CEOs can be replaced, shouldn't founders be also (who are often CEOs)? What about all levels of leadership? Why can't AIs just run full companies autonomously?
- whoisthemachine 10mo agoEven if this did happen there would no doubt be some sweet-talking schmuck with half a college degree and connections to all the other rich and powerful (likely through their dad) claiming credit for everything the LLM did.
- felipeerias 10mo agoSome CEOs are obviously extremely skilled at marshalling large organisations in the successful pursue of business goals, while the rest derive most of their value from sharing a job title with the first group.
- oxag3n 10mo agoIf CEOs are automated, i.e. eliminated, then all decisions, popular and unpopular will be attributed to boards. It's related to other CxO as well. Who'd you blame for insulin price increase over years if CFO was a script parametrized by the board?
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- sfc32 10mo agohttps://archive.is/uiRyN https://archive.is/uiRyN
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- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago(2021) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943218
- iseletsk 10mo agoAs a founder/CEO who started as a programmer, I have been running my second company for 15 years. I am not great, but I got the company to be sizable and profitable. 1. I will take five automated CEOs. If I can split my company into five distinct companies (one per product), it would be amazing. We are splitting the company into two to streamline focus on different/incompatible industries, and I am dreading the process of finding another CEO. It is very, very hard. 2. I know a lot of CEOs. It helps. I didn't know a single one when I started. It is no more a cult than my programmer's peer group was. 3. Did I tell you how hard it is to find a good CEO? It is VERY, VERY hard. Think of hiring a great product guy with agency to do whatever needs to be done, with people skills to attract talent, a sales drive, and a willingness to deal with finance & legal. Oh, and I am in the tech field, so I need him to be very hardcore technical. Your mileage might vary, but this is who I need. Anyone who has that is running their own companies. Oh, and the person has to have a proven track record. I cannot let someone unproven ruin the company and well-being of hundreds of employees and tens of thousands of customers. 4. I don't believe CEOs are special in any way other than that most other professionals are special. There are probably some underlying qualities, but they're all so different. 5. Some CEOs got there because they were lucky, but they didn't stay there for long because of luck. It is very, very simple to screw up as a CEO. 6. Growing someone within an organization to become a CEO is very hard. We are trying - giving some people more and more responsibilities, trying to involve them in more and more aspects of the organization. The filter is - repeatable success. You don't have to succeed all the time, but you have to succeed most of the time. Most people don't want the pressure, aren't interested in certain aspects, or are unsuccessful more often than they should. 7. Boards are not a cult as well; they don't have CEO's back. Boards are represented by investors (pension funds, wealthy individuals, etc.) - they will oust the CEO if the company's performance suffers. They are willing to pay a lot to the CEO because ... it is so hard to find a good CEO.
- duxup 10mo agoI've seen some truly great CEOs from time to time. I knew what they did. I have zero idea what most CEOs that I've worked for do ... and the seem to want it that way.
- refurb 10mo agoThis article fundamentally misunderstands the role of a CEO. The main job of CEOs is not decision making. 99% of company decisions are made below the level of CEO. For the ones that make it to CEO, the board tends to have final say. It’s a leadership role where people interactions are the most important. The CEO sets the tone, gets people on the same page, and is the external face of the company. It’s silly to think a robot can replace that.
- jjk166 10mo agoYou don't automate jobs, you automate tasks. In the very near future any CEO worth even a fraction of their compensation will automate most of their day to day tasks, and will use AI to better accomplish things that are currently hard. Certainly to some degree the optimal skillset for a good CEO will transform, but the role will remain.
- SergeAx 10mo agoThis is precisely the same dilemma as self-driving cars. Who will be held accountable if something goes wrong? Who will be dragged into court by shareholders?
- jasfi 10mo agoThat's a role that would require AGI, we're not there yet.
- saimiam 10mo agoWho gets the final signing authority and can be held liable for specific mistakes or crimes commissioned by the company if there is no CEO?
- fallingfrog 10mo agoA CEO is just a mascot without the goofy outfit.
- throw-12-16 10mo agoCEO is the most over valued position in human history aside from literal royalty.
- pdyc 10mo agoif something goes wrong with that "automation" who takes the responsibility? as a shareholder are you comfortable with it? i am not.
- Havoc 10mo agoHow expensive something is is a very poor starting point for what we should attempt to automate with nascent technology that still has a pretty high miss rate It’s not entirely irrelevant to the commercial case but you really need to start with technical feasibility and how resilient the job is to mistakes. And something that is high risk, high leverage and very softskills/experience driven is a bad place for AI imo Anthropic‘s shenanigans with their AI vendor should illustrate how far we are from credible AI CEOs
- pabe 10mo agoThere are CEO affect studies. Seems like the CEO effect on company performance is about 11.5%, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984323000590 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898432... In my opinion, a lot of strategic work can be automated - and results would actually be better. Why? Because the strategic management agent would most likely follow a scientific process and make small bets instead of investing millions in initiatives without having a clear signal. What you cannot automate is the human contact. Trust between humans. Enlighting the fire that burns inside you inside others. CEOs aren't necessarily the best strategic thinkers but they're very good in dealing with people and they are high-agency people.
- an-allen 10mo agoLLMs are by definition computations on known public data - meaning any LLM CEO strategy will be only briefly competitive. LLMs lack networks and the ability to strategise internally an execute without the whole plan being known to everyone. So I just don’t think if your AI CEO says lets build an iCar, well someone elses AI CEO is going to tell your competitor the same basic plan. Once LLMs have Networks and unique and private insights…