4 ms·

A part of me was hoping that with LLMs getting better and better at mimicking corporate nothing-speak that we'd realize that we can automate away a lot of the e

by tombert 7mo ago

A part of me was hoping that with LLMs getting better and better at mimicking corporate nothing-speak that we'd realize that we can automate away a lot of the executives, Vice Presidents, and CEOs. Of course that was a naive hope on my end; if history has taught us anything, executives at big companies appear to only be skilled at one thing: shielding themselves from the consequences of their awful decisions. Instead of automating away a job that is mostly about blathering on with half-truths about the future of the company (something that AI could actually do perfectly fine), they instead think they can fire half the engineers and replace them with a Claude Code.

ep103 7mo ago
I see this sentiment repeated so often, and its so surprising to me that people have this train of thought. If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense. But it isn't. Every one of our jobs exists as a contract that was initially offered by an owner of capital, and created in order to make that person more money. As such, ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced, because it is the atom from which all the rest of the market's building blocks have been built. AI could replace every job in the market, and company-owner would be the only job left untouched, because every other job in existence, ultimately, has been created to serve that person, not the other way around.
- Tade0 7mo ago
  A CEO is an employee just like any other and reports to the shareholders. It's just that they're typically also a shareholder.
  - fn-mote 7mo ago
    I don’t think this is about jobs. I think this is about information, power, and access to power. The way a company with a bad C-suite gets fixed is by being competed out of existence. The way workers with bad bosses can fix that is imo limited, mostly to “find another job”. I’m curious if anyone has ever heard of “complain to the board during the CEO’s renewal phase” being successful. It didn’t happen at places I know about.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      The way that happens is you have enough money to buy enough shares to have enough votes to force a change in the board. Usually referred to as "activist shareholders" or "corporate raiders" whatnot. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/an-activist-investor-forced-giant-changes-at-southwest-airlines-now-its-cashing-out/91301904 https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/an-activist-investor-forc... https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-activist-investors-in-the-us-5083258 https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-activist-investors-in-th...
  - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
    > just like any other I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense.
- phil21 7mo ago
  It's easiest to mental model (for me) that those closest to the money are the last ones out the door. They control the purse strings and what the money is spent on. So if you are the CEO, you are basically one or two tiers away from the money. Those who report to the CEO 5 levels deep are pretty far away. Believing that someone very close to the money is going to replace themselves is incredibly naive.
  - AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
    No, the CEOs aren't going to replace themselves. The owners might replace them, though. From Schlock Mercenary: "I can replace desk-meat like you with a Turing dynamo, an Eliza helix, and a white noise generator."
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    If you could replace yourself with a program running on your laptop that took all your meetings and responded to your emails for you, while you did other stuff, wouldn't you? It's not naivety, I can see it as very appealing to this characature in my head of a CEO who just wants to go off and be lazy and fuck their secretary.
    - phil21 7mo ago
      Would you also replace your salary and title? Or would you let your AI bot do your work for you and still get paid? Sure owners in the end might get wise and realize they can fire the human and just keep the bot doing all the work. Or they might decide that having a person to manage all the bots instead of them is worth the money to not be bothered going all the way. Or perhaps it takes until the board alol replaces themselves with bots that those bots decide it’s time to do away with the pesky human. Either way it’s the last of the dominos to fall.
- tombert 7mo ago
  Ownership is a little different; there are a lot of jobs in BigCos where they don't own the company but still basically only serve to blather half-truths to the employees. My dad used to have a boss that he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he felt that the way he spoke was indistinguishable from ChatGPT, and he could be replaced with ChatGPT without anyone noticing a different. This guy wasn't the owner of the company, he was just a higher-level manager.
- gruez 7mo ago
  >If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense. How would this even work? "workers compete at their crafts" doesn't put food on the table. I'm sure that if "economics" and "capitalism" wasn't a factor, most of HN would be making indie games or whatever instead of making enterprise SaaS apps.
- avidiax 7mo ago
  > ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced Humans will always be the roots of the ownership graph, but I think AI can be any other node. Start an AI-first hedge fund or private equity firm. The AI makes the decisions. There may be a human manager, but they've agreed to be the AI's arms and ears. AI starts looking like a root owner if/when it starts managing a large charitable endowment, however. Same thing with managers, particularly CEOs. The board may become dissatisfied with the present CEO, and start requiring that they run all decisions past an AI. The board agrees to certain values or priorities for the AI. Eventually, the AI is the one effectively in control, and the CEO is just a vestigial organ drawing a salary in case the AI ever makes a very bad decision.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
  The current structure is just the evolution of Norman lords, only they no longer have to worry about the pesky governing detail and can focus solely on value extraction. But corporate attitude towards humans, both their workers and the 'markets' they extract from, are if anything less humane. The Normans had to have their conquered populations housed, getting married, having kids in order to have workers/something to extract from. Corporate Normanism just throws people away/moves to another group.
HPsquared 7mo ago
A critical part of the job is to NOT say certain things, which LLMs are only just getting good at.
rchaud 7mo ago
AI may be able to mimic the cadence and vocabulary of CEO-speak, but it can't possess in-group signifiers like fraternity rings, golf club memberships or be able to trade favors like getting invites to the right kind of parties. All of these are required as part of an elaborate dance to placate a merry band of institutional investors, earnings analysts and politicians.
- tombert 7mo ago
  I'm just a regular intelligence, and sadly it appears I can't possess those things either; I've tried to break into the finance world [1], and I've learned that despite fifteen years of software experience, it doesn't matter if I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I wonder if there is a service that just serves as a "degree cleanse" where I can technically say I have a degree from Columbia or something without having to spend $200,000 going through another degree program. [1] Admittedly for money, but also it's one of the few areas where I might realistically be allowed to do math.
  - rchaud 7mo ago
    There are three ways into the finance world; straight out of undergrad from a 'target' school with at least one summer intership at target bank, MBA from a target school, or Math PhD from a well-regarded school.
    - tombert 7mo ago
      Is there a fourth way of doing it by befriending a random person who already works there and can get shoehorned in? Probably not, I'm sure they care about the pedigree more than basically anything else. I send an application to RenTec every six months, almost as a joke because I would be extremely surprised if they continue after seeing <NOT A TOP 20 SCHOOL> on my resume. Granted, I don't think you really "apply" to RenTec to begin with, I think realistically they actually find you.
      - rchaud 7mo ago

by tombert 7mo ago

ep103 7mo ago

I see this sentiment repeated so often, and its so surprising to me that people have this train of thought. If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense. But it isn't. Every one of our jobs exists as a contract that was initially offered by an owner of capital, and created in order to make that person more money. As such, ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced, because it is the atom from which all the rest of the market's building blocks have been built. AI could replace every job in the market, and company-owner would be the only job left untouched, because every other job in existence, ultimately, has been created to serve that person, not the other way around.

Tade0 7mo ago
A CEO is an employee just like any other and reports to the shareholders. It's just that they're typically also a shareholder.
- fn-mote 7mo ago
  I don’t think this is about jobs. I think this is about information, power, and access to power. The way a company with a bad C-suite gets fixed is by being competed out of existence. The way workers with bad bosses can fix that is imo limited, mostly to “find another job”. I’m curious if anyone has ever heard of “complain to the board during the CEO’s renewal phase” being successful. It didn’t happen at places I know about.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    The way that happens is you have enough money to buy enough shares to have enough votes to force a change in the board. Usually referred to as "activist shareholders" or "corporate raiders" whatnot. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/an-activist-investor-forced-giant-changes-at-southwest-airlines-now-its-cashing-out/91301904 https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/an-activist-investor-forc... https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-activist-investors-in-the-us-5083258 https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-activist-investors-in-th...
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
  > just like any other I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense.
phil21 7mo ago
It's easiest to mental model (for me) that those closest to the money are the last ones out the door. They control the purse strings and what the money is spent on. So if you are the CEO, you are basically one or two tiers away from the money. Those who report to the CEO 5 levels deep are pretty far away. Believing that someone very close to the money is going to replace themselves is incredibly naive.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
  No, the CEOs aren't going to replace themselves. The owners might replace them, though. From Schlock Mercenary: "I can replace desk-meat like you with a Turing dynamo, an Eliza helix, and a white noise generator."
- fragmede 7mo ago
  If you could replace yourself with a program running on your laptop that took all your meetings and responded to your emails for you, while you did other stuff, wouldn't you? It's not naivety, I can see it as very appealing to this characature in my head of a CEO who just wants to go off and be lazy and fuck their secretary.
  - phil21 7mo ago
    Would you also replace your salary and title? Or would you let your AI bot do your work for you and still get paid? Sure owners in the end might get wise and realize they can fire the human and just keep the bot doing all the work. Or they might decide that having a person to manage all the bots instead of them is worth the money to not be bothered going all the way. Or perhaps it takes until the board alol replaces themselves with bots that those bots decide it’s time to do away with the pesky human. Either way it’s the last of the dominos to fall.
tombert 7mo ago
Ownership is a little different; there are a lot of jobs in BigCos where they don't own the company but still basically only serve to blather half-truths to the employees. My dad used to have a boss that he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he felt that the way he spoke was indistinguishable from ChatGPT, and he could be replaced with ChatGPT without anyone noticing a different. This guy wasn't the owner of the company, he was just a higher-level manager.
gruez 7mo ago
>If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense. How would this even work? "workers compete at their crafts" doesn't put food on the table. I'm sure that if "economics" and "capitalism" wasn't a factor, most of HN would be making indie games or whatever instead of making enterprise SaaS apps.
avidiax 7mo ago
> ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced Humans will always be the roots of the ownership graph, but I think AI can be any other node. Start an AI-first hedge fund or private equity firm. The AI makes the decisions. There may be a human manager, but they've agreed to be the AI's arms and ears. AI starts looking like a root owner if/when it starts managing a large charitable endowment, however. Same thing with managers, particularly CEOs. The board may become dissatisfied with the present CEO, and start requiring that they run all decisions past an AI. The board agrees to certain values or priorities for the AI. Eventually, the AI is the one effectively in control, and the CEO is just a vestigial organ drawing a salary in case the AI ever makes a very bad decision.
_DeadFred_ 7mo ago
The current structure is just the evolution of Norman lords, only they no longer have to worry about the pesky governing detail and can focus solely on value extraction. But corporate attitude towards humans, both their workers and the 'markets' they extract from, are if anything less humane. The Normans had to have their conquered populations housed, getting married, having kids in order to have workers/something to extract from. Corporate Normanism just throws people away/moves to another group.

HPsquared 7mo ago

A critical part of the job is to NOT say certain things, which LLMs are only just getting good at.

rchaud 7mo ago

AI may be able to mimic the cadence and vocabulary of CEO-speak, but it can't possess in-group signifiers like fraternity rings, golf club memberships or be able to trade favors like getting invites to the right kind of parties. All of these are required as part of an elaborate dance to placate a merry band of institutional investors, earnings analysts and politicians.

tombert 7mo ago
I'm just a regular intelligence, and sadly it appears I can't possess those things either; I've tried to break into the finance world [1], and I've learned that despite fifteen years of software experience, it doesn't matter if I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I wonder if there is a service that just serves as a "degree cleanse" where I can technically say I have a degree from Columbia or something without having to spend $200,000 going through another degree program. [1] Admittedly for money, but also it's one of the few areas where I might realistically be allowed to do math.
- rchaud 7mo ago
  There are three ways into the finance world; straight out of undergrad from a 'target' school with at least one summer intership at target bank, MBA from a target school, or Math PhD from a well-regarded school.
  - tombert 7mo ago
    Is there a fourth way of doing it by befriending a random person who already works there and can get shoehorned in? Probably not, I'm sure they care about the pedigree more than basically anything else. I send an application to RenTec every six months, almost as a joke because I would be extremely surprised if they continue after seeing <NOT A TOP 20 SCHOOL> on my resume. Granted, I don't think you really "apply" to RenTec to begin with, I think realistically they actually find you.
    - rchaud 7mo ago