5 ms·

> I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about i

> I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about it. At that point, why do you even need the CEO?

ako 9mo ago
And who does he sell his software to? Companies that have only 1 employee, don’t need a lot of user licenses for their employees…
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  What would be the point of selling software in such a world ? (where anyone could build any piece of software with a handful of keystrokes)
arjie 9mo ago
Reminds me of an old joke[0]: > The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. But really, the reason is that people like Pieter Levels do exist: masters at product vision and marketing. He also happens to be a proficient programmer, but there are probably other versions of him which are not programmers who will find the bar to product easier to meet now. 0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
- MrDunham 9mo ago
  My technical cofounder reminds me of this story on a weekly basis.
ceejayoz 9mo ago
As Steinbeck is often slightly misquoted: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Same deal here, but everyone imagines themselves as the billionaire CEO in charge of the perfectly compliant and effective AI.
tiku 9mo ago
For the network.
mettamage 9mo ago
All of us are a CEO by that point.
- ArtificialAI 9mo ago
  If everyone is, no one is.
  - empath75 9mo ago
    Wouldn't that be a good thing?
    - shimman 9mo ago
      If you think the purpose of living your one single life in the universe is to become a CEO, you have a failure of imagination and should likely be debanked to protect society.
pixelready 9mo ago
The board (in theory) represents the interests of investors, and even with all of the other duties of a CEO stripped away, they will want a ringable neck / PR mouthpiece / fall guy for strategic missteps or publicly unpopular moves by the company. The managerial equivalent of having your hands on the driving wheel of a self-driving car.
jerf 9mo ago
You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to "capture" more and more of the value being generated and leaving less and less for their customers, until their customer's full time job is ensuring the AIs are actually generating some value for them and not just the AI owner.
- ekidd 9mo ago
  > You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. In this scenario, why does the AI care what any of these humans think? The CEO, the board, the shareholders, the "AI company"—they're all just a bunch of dumb chimps providing zero value to the AI, and who have absolutely no clue what's going on. If your scenario assumes that you have a highly capable AI that can fill every role in a large corporation, then you have one hell of a principal-agent problem.
  - jerf 9mo ago
    If we get to that point, there won't be very many CEOs to be discussing. I was just referring to the near future. I think the honeymoon AI phase is rapidly coming to a close, as evidenced by the increasingly close hoofbeat sounds of LLMs being turned to serve ads right in their output. (To be honest, there's already a bunch of things I wouldn't turn to them for under any circumstances because they're been ideologically tuned from day one, but this is less obvious than "they're outright serving me ads" to people.) If the "AI bubble" pops you can expect this to really take off in earnest as they have to monetize. It remains to be seen how much of the AI's value ends up captured by the owners. Given what we've seen from companies like Microsoft with how they've scrambled Windows so hard that "the year of the Linux desktop" is rapidly turning from perennial joke to aspirational target for so many, I have no confident in the owners capturing 150%+ of the value... and yes, I mean that quite literally with all of its implications.

ako 9mo ago

And who does he sell his software to? Companies that have only 1 employee, don’t need a lot of user licenses for their employees…

AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
What would be the point of selling software in such a world ? (where anyone could build any piece of software with a handful of keystrokes)

arjie 9mo ago

Reminds me of an old joke[0]: > The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. But really, the reason is that people like Pieter Levels do exist: masters at product vision and marketing. He also happens to be a proficient programmer, but there are probably other versions of him which are not programmers who will find the bar to product easier to meet now. 0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/

MrDunham 9mo ago
My technical cofounder reminds me of this story on a weekly basis.

ceejayoz 9mo ago

As Steinbeck is often slightly misquoted: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Same deal here, but everyone imagines themselves as the billionaire CEO in charge of the perfectly compliant and effective AI.

tiku 9mo ago

For the network.

mettamage 9mo ago

All of us are a CEO by that point.

ArtificialAI 9mo ago
If everyone is, no one is.
- empath75 9mo ago
  Wouldn't that be a good thing?
  - shimman 9mo ago
    If you think the purpose of living your one single life in the universe is to become a CEO, you have a failure of imagination and should likely be debanked to protect society.

pixelready 9mo ago

The board (in theory) represents the interests of investors, and even with all of the other duties of a CEO stripped away, they will want a ringable neck / PR mouthpiece / fall guy for strategic missteps or publicly unpopular moves by the company. The managerial equivalent of having your hands on the driving wheel of a self-driving car.

jerf 9mo ago

You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to "capture" more and more of the value being generated and leaving less and less for their customers, until their customer's full time job is ensuring the AIs are actually generating some value for them and not just the AI owner.

ekidd 9mo ago
> You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. In this scenario, why does the AI care what any of these humans think? The CEO, the board, the shareholders, the "AI company"—they're all just a bunch of dumb chimps providing zero value to the AI, and who have absolutely no clue what's going on. If your scenario assumes that you have a highly capable AI that can fill every role in a large corporation, then you have one hell of a principal-agent problem.
- jerf 9mo ago
  If we get to that point, there won't be very many CEOs to be discussing. I was just referring to the near future. I think the honeymoon AI phase is rapidly coming to a close, as evidenced by the increasingly close hoofbeat sounds of LLMs being turned to serve ads right in their output. (To be honest, there's already a bunch of things I wouldn't turn to them for under any circumstances because they're been ideologically tuned from day one, but this is less obvious than "they're outright serving me ads" to people.) If the "AI bubble" pops you can expect this to really take off in earnest as they have to monetize. It remains to be seen how much of the AI's value ends up captured by the owners. Given what we've seen from companies like Microsoft with how they've scrambled Windows so hard that "the year of the Linux desktop" is rapidly turning from perennial joke to aspirational target for so many, I have no confident in the owners capturing 150%+ of the value... and yes, I mean that quite literally with all of its implications.