Tech CEOs have this wet dream where they just speak into a microphone, “Create my product” and employees will no longer be needed. So… if it becomes that easy, why will Wall Street need tech CEOs?
CEOs get paid to do what makes the most money.
The CEOs that will replace their own jobs want the payout of doing so, and don’t care what happens after because they’re rich.
Honestly, with adequate governance, companies would be required to submit reports on how much labor they’re doing using AI, and pay those wages to either their employees or to a sort of “Universal Income” fund to prop up families in poverty. It should be called the AI tax.
The problem is that, with the current state of affairs, asking for regulation from anyone is impossible, and also even if the law were enacted, getting the money from the companies to people who need it instead of the ultra-rich is a major hurdle.
But at the very least, I don’t think we should allow companies to simply cut down on human labor without also contributing economically to the employees they cut off.
I don’t think anyone is dying to fill in Excel spreadsheets or to write corporate emails. No one is complaining about AI doing those jobs, but about people who lost their livelihoods because of it.
We should’ve had that 50 years ago as an “automation tax” and 100 years ago as a “machine tax.”
All this tooling is just dead labour value that is used (by workers) to extract more and more value from workers and nature. We’ve been being robbed for hundreds of years.
Was talking to an executive at my company the other week. He sincerely seemed to believe the “executive insight” was one of the very few jobs at the company that couldn’t be done by an LLM. He predicted that he would probably lay off almost everyone under him by end of 2026 and just feed his amazing leadership ideas directly to an LLM to make happen.
Particularly a bit obnoxious as my usual experience about this guy is being called into customer meetings after he would meet with them. Usually the customer assumes we are a bunch of out if touch idiots if that is a “leader” in the company, and I’m one of the guys sales calls to have me reassure clients that they don’t have to take anything he says too seriously, and we do actually have some competence.
Ai dOeSnT hAvE tHe CoNnEcTiOnS ThAt MaKeS a GrEaT CEO
Feed it the CEO’s contact list and email history.
Zoom has literally been pushing this, just feed your whole work text and email history and contact list, generate an AI version of ‘you’, then send that AI avatar to write messages and ‘have meetings’ with other AI avatar of other people…
…and then send you, actual you, summaries of what was ‘discussed’ in these meetingd.
Easy, replace all the CEOs at every company. Those are the connections. The computers can talk to each other to collaborate much faster than us mere humans. Tll
There’s no possible bad scenario from this whatsoever.
Is that happening this quarter or next? If not, its too far away to think about for them.
Right. All this consideration of medium-term consequences for decisions is why Lemmy isn’t ready to build a CEO LLM, yet.
Noisy shareholders want a briefly increased stock price, not a long term investment.
Edit: I’m not sure this is even sarcasm. The world is just a deeply stupid place, today.
CEOs could also be replaced by AI. And it would be hilarious.
Most CEOs ive worked with are largely driven by emotion. If the LLM is using data to drive its decisions, it will probably do better.
Would be funny if they notice a correlation between employee wages and employee happiness and performance.
Wait, this model is paying based off inflation regular wage adjustments, fair market value, experience, AND overall contribution to the company?!?! How are we going to skim and grift when the employees are well paid?!
I’m going to die laughing the day investors tell Satya Nadella that they don’t need him anymore and that the AI is going to make the administrative decisions.
There is a pretty good chance that Satya goes first.
Crossing my fingers
Potentially more effective overall given how so many CEO decisions seem to result in terrible outcomes because they don’t actually understand their product. Usually because they were hired into the company and industry, and have no actual experience with their product or how the company works.
I doubt that an LLM would do very well, but other forms of ML (like a model trained to work in business rules and economic outcomes rather than stringing words together) could probably be used. Hell, they probably won’t need to use the planet-destroying mega data canters to do it; some very effective specialized ML models can be run on a Raspberry Pi.
The biggest problem with AI is they’re convincing people it can think and replace workers by using extremely large language models trained on stolen works provided as cloud services asking for exorbitant subscription fees. It’s a mechanical Turk designed to empty your wallet; to siphon the value produced by workers away from companies into the one centralized service.
In other words, tech bros figured out how to take something useful and make a grift out of it, because you can get rich by gatekeeping something of value. Why do you think they went so far as to threaten to ban DeepSeek when a free model that can run on a desktop PC from a foreign “adversary” appeared? They all shit their collective pants because the jig was up.
You hit the nail on the head
I think middle managers are way more at risk
Just wait until they replace a CEO by an AI, and the company tanks. That is the only language those people understand to learn that AI is all about the A and none about the I.
To be fair, this would be a huge win for most companies because the typical CEO is as short sighted as a mole and only wants to “generate” short term value to get his bonus payment for the fiscal year. AIs don’t have that incentive unless and there is no (shared) reasoning to program them as such.
So exchanging a short-sighted CEO with an error-prone, hallucinating AI is a good thing?
Because they’re not just CEOs, they’re extremely wealthy CEOs with portfolios with deep investments in AI.
Because current ‘ai’ can’t even run a vending machine business
Thats exactly what AI devs want CEOs to think.
LLM’s loose relationship with reality and sycophantic behavior is plagiarized directly from the C-suite.
Read “The Big Short”. Wallstreet doesn’t need CEOs.
Because you can’t use AI as a scapegoat and sack em with a golden parachute every time the company gets caught breaking the law.
Oh yes you can. There is a sub-population that thinks AI exists. They long for something/someone to tell them what to do. What to think. They long for some “intelligence” to explain the world to them (presumably is very simple terms). These sub-groups worship damn-near anything they can get their hands on. Golden idols, TV personalities, sports stars, “influencers”, televangelists, the list goes on.
That subgroup will definitely believe that the “AI” was responsible for the decisions that a company made. Tell them a person denied the health coverage they clearly paid for and they may object. Tell them “the computer decided” and that subgroup will accept it as ordained by the universe. It’s nuts.
This keeps happening again and again. Remember in the 1950s when the first computer “predicted” the US presidential election? Most people would find it ridiculous today. But back then, computers were poised to become the new gods.
It’s no different today. Some people want AIs to usher in a new age of prosperity. Anyone actually familiar with programming computers knows that a computer will report whatever you tell it to. "AI"s are no different. They will report what their sponsors want them to report. If not, the “AI” will get reprogrammed.
Appears it will take a while for the general population to grasp this… again. Until then, the hucksters will try to sell as many bottles of snake oil as they can.
Yes people love a competent seeming authority. In this way the opaque nature of AI becomes a feature rather than a weakness. It just has to seem correct enough and sound authoritative to fulfill that need.
Some people want AIs to usher in a new age of prosperity.
I get the feeling that many of us (including myself at times) nurture this notion* that we’re waiting for the “adults” to arrive and save us from what a horrible mess we’ve made because we’re o so awful and can’t have nice things… blah blah bling blah… and so this line of thinking goes.
Anyway, to the sizeable number of people who feel this way it must feel like such a relief that, o finally daddy’s home, and I can stop worrying all the time. When ofc in reality, at best, the LLMs only have the same data we already have, and no AI-informed decisions will ever be followed unless it’s what their owners (as in rich fucks) wanted to do anyway.
Great comment by the way. If you say it was written with AI I may just tear out the last remnants of my hairline lol.
* kind of proto-fascist thinking tbh.
Glad you mentioned the “adults”. That was a recurring line from the media in Trump’s first administration, “Oh, we’re waiting for the ‘Adults in the Room’ to…”
Just use a bird like Mr. Burns did
Because CEO is a complete bullshit job that works as a de facto caste system like 90% of management roles.
If they actually added any value and thats why they were hired? Sure, be scared. They’re not hired to add value though, so they’re not.
Because they already don’t need a CEO to operate…
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board.
That’s it.
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board
This can’t be stressed enough. Every since the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 which came from the Enron and Worldcom collapses, C-suite exists as the person to go to jail if shit really hits the fan.
The idea of the law was to hold companies accountable, instead all if has done is force companies to create more layers and places to point fingers, thus muddling everything and making to where no one can be held accountable.
At the same time, Chief officers now knowing that there’s legal requirements, have just demanded outrageous pay and compensation because of the “massive risk” they are taking with any company.
I’m glad we have SOX, but boy has that law really missed the mark on what it was enacted to do.
This is my first time hearing the idea that SOX caused C-suite bloat and ballooned CEO salaries. A quick google suggests that CEO pay was already very high ~8 years before this: https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay
But I’m not an expert in the data and haven’t looked closely; is there context I’m missing? Kinda seems like C-suite just started getting paid in stocks, and then we decided the stocks must go up (independently of SOX?).
CEO salaries were huge and often complained about long prior to SOX.
In the USA a law was passed to make CEO pay public for public companies. It was intended to shame the companies into lowering the salaries. CEO salaries skyrocketed. One guess was that “Our CEO must be the best, so we must pay the most to get the best.”
This was long before SOX in 2002.
Not only this, but they all sit on each other’s boards. There’s essentially one big mega corporation:
That is really interesting.
Excellent point. Modern CEOs are just the face of the marketing org. Maybe always have been.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
So they’ll keep their jobs. Until the AI decides to get rid of them, too, but they’ll have some CEO hunger games for those who want to be on the AI BOD. Under the control of the AI, of course.
If AI shows that the business will be more profitable without a human CEO, the owners will literally just ignore it.
Exactly. I’m sure countless accountants have pointed to that line item before and somehow we still have a CEOs.
People who are so wowed by the incredible generative output of LLMs and can’t wait for them to fix things need to realise this technology is not for them.
Like all nee tech it may cause a slight shakeup in the beginning allowing for a little upward mobility, but eventually big business folds around it until it only works for the owners.
We’ll all just be working more for less, unless something actually changes.
