Joe
Proto Himbo EuropeanAnother take on AI that (at least for now) kinda nails it.
Bill Jorth@guyjantic @coolinthegame Not only the middle managers are unconscious. Also the senior managers are unconscious. The executive managers are also only conscious to the extent of being self serving.
Femme Malheureuse@wdjorth @guyjantic @coolinthegame Why shareholders don't demand replacing the most expensive tiers of corporate management with AI I will never know, especially since most are simply regurgitating the same trite crap they acquired from B-school curriculum.
Amazing how uppermost management is the layer most unaffected by AI implementation.
@femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
Right? I suspect it's similar to the reasons they didn't demand middle/upper management get outsourced to India, replaced by interns, efficiency'd, etc. as all of those would make a lot of sense in many cases and save the company significant cash. But they never seem to do that.
Right? I suspect it's similar to the reasons they didn't demand middle/upper management get outsourced to India, replaced by interns, efficiency'd, etc. as all of those would make a lot of sense in many cases and save the company significant cash. But they never seem to do that.
@guyjantic @wdjorth @coolinthegame Could make a lot of workers very happy and more productive by axing the top tiers, replacing them with AI which simply checks in on workers' attitudes every day, and paying them a chunk of the compensation currently paid out to management/executives.
This article is from 2021. The inequality has only gotten worse.
"But mah inflation! Mah eggs cost too much!"
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978: CEOs were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker in 2020
What this report finds: Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages that have grown much faster than the stock market and the pay of typical workers, college graduates, and even the top 0.1%. In 2020, a CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average (using a “realized” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in rather than when granted). This 18.9% increase from 2019 occurred because of rapid growth in vested stock awards and exercised stock options. Using a different “granted” measure of CEO pay, average top CEO compensation was $13.9 million in 2020, slightly below its level in 2019. In 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 351-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more than other very high earners (wage earners in the top 0.1%)—more than six times as much. From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,322%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (817%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 341% between 1978 and 2019, the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.0% from 1978 to 2020.
@femme_mal @guyjantic @coolinthegame The solutions are not difficult to understand but are very difficult to get established given that the politicians and courts are beholden to the wealthy at the expense of the working class.
anyGould@guyjantic I've always figured that there's a type of senior manager who needs his middle managers as insulation, not as delegation. You don't want them to think, you want them to parrot what you told them and take the blame.
@anyGould so you've worked at a US university, then?
@guyjantic Nope, corporate life for me. You get similar here - folks who like to upload praise to them and download blame to the staff (and aiming to get promoted elsewhere before folks get wise.)
@guyjantic @femme_mal @coolinthegame There are many cases where layers of management have been eliminated or sourced from other countries depending on how much power the executives felt the lower layers held and where they were willing to release that power. It is all about maximizing the executive and shareholder value over all else. And shareholders really skew to the wealthy non-executive power brokers influencing the boards.
Jeff Grigg@guyjantic @femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
I have observed that top management consulting firms have absolutely embraced Generative AI for producing management presentations. Dream up whatever you want to do. Then bury the opposition with a huge volume AI generated text and images "supporting" your position. The company pays for it all, as a business expense. Top execs. game their "performance" numbers and walk away with huge bonus payments.
@guyjantic @femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
Also, there's a whole industry producing "objective scientifically validated numbers" used to justify many top management decisions. Very impressive. Lots of charts and graphs. With error bars and everything.
…
@guyjantic @femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
But here's the thing:
It's really all just opinion surveys of other industry executives.
Yes, they are objectively and verifiably measuring the opinions and feelings of other executives.
But that's more a measure of successful marketing, not truth or factual understanding or information.
They're providing objective looking justification for action, not factual data about reality.
…
@guyjantic @femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
It's "cover." It's a blame game. If and when it goes wrong, everyone can blame everyone else. Long after every party has made off with their share of the loot.
✕
@guyjantic @femme_mal @wdjorth @coolinthegame
Lemmings.
It's a game of "Let's all be lemmings!"
That way, no one can be held responsible for the (inevitable predictable) bad results.
@JeffGrigg @guyjantic @wdjorth @coolinthegame It'll do them a fat lot of good in the back of the tumbrels.
Jargoggles@femme_mal @wdjorth @guyjantic @coolinthegame
They know full well that they're engaged in class warfare and don't want to attack their own side.
They know full well that they're engaged in class warfare and don't want to attack their own side.
@jargoggles @wdjorth @guyjantic @coolinthegame Millionaires aren't billionaires -- they just like to think they are. Billionaires could easily axe the millionaires who have been in turn their ax men. They just don't want to lose that layer of meat between themselves and the angry horde below (ex. the accessible UHC CEO who died instead of an oligarch who holds a huge chunk of UHC stock in their portfolio).
@jargoggles @wdjorth @guyjantic @coolinthegame Post-script: worth reading the wikipedia entry for UHC's founder.
@femme_mal @jargoggles @guyjantic @coolinthegame Also understand he was being investigated for money laundering and was on his way to the inquiry.
@wdjorth @coolinthegame Coming from academia, where we have lots of middle managers with titles like "dean," "associate provost," etc., this tracks. I think the job aggressively discourages free thought of any kind, despite the constant assertion of the opposite. The only way to survive and move up the income ladder as an academic middle manager, I think, is to figure out what all the other middle managers are doing and then (a) do that while claiming it's unique and (b) praise all of the other middle managers for their unique and bold actions.
In other words, I think the job itself requires a lack of active consciousness, though I also think this probably takes a lot of effort.
Friend Computer@guyjantic
Hey! I resemble that remark.
Hey! I resemble that remark.
J. "Henry" Waugh@guyjantic speaking of "AI sentience" an article I can't stop mentioning and seems very relevant:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
> I first thought that these were just classic cases of tech bubble enthusiasm [... but] the believers in the “AI” bubble sound very different from those of prior bubbles [...] This specific blend of awe, disbelief, and dread all sound like the words of a victim of a mentalist scam artist—psychics
@jhwgh1968 Thank you for this! I've thought something similar; lots of what LLMs spit out works as "barnum statements/interpretations".
thinkbeforecoding@jhwgh1968 @guyjantic this one of the best thing I have read about AI so far.
Momo@guyjantic
A late friend of mine always said: "The problem is the tie. They bind it too tight cutting off the blood circuitry to the brain, which causes brain damage and other management-typical behavior"
@Madic
A late friend of mine always said: "The problem is the tie. They bind it too tight cutting off the blood circuitry to the brain, which causes brain damage and other management-typical behavior"
@Madic
Mx. Eddie R@momo @guyjantic @Madic
Business writing teacher in college expanded on the theory. Men tend to pick their shirt size (specifically, collar size) when they start their career; by the time they reach executive level they've gotten softer and thicker and should wear a bigger collar, but instead they wear the same size as in their 20s and cut off blood flow to their brain.
Business writing teacher in college expanded on the theory. Men tend to pick their shirt size (specifically, collar size) when they start their career; by the time they reach executive level they've gotten softer and thicker and should wear a bigger collar, but instead they wear the same size as in their 20s and cut off blood flow to their brain.
Stefan Baur 8 * 💉@guyjantic I always compared AI answers to what an IL-series Cylon from the old Battlestar Galactica TV show would say.
Never thought of Middle Management before. But it all makes sense now. IL-series Cylons are the equivalent of Middle Management …
Never thought of Middle Management before. But it all makes sense now. IL-series Cylons are the equivalent of Middle Management …
@farbenstau Holy shit. This is excellent.
@guyjantic Penny-Drop-Moment, eh?
Nafeon (Backup Account)@guyjantic "birds aren't real" was a lie spread by corporate middle managers, to keep your mind busy so that you're not thinking about them.
@NafiTheBear This is my favorite headcanon conspiracy theory of the week.
Alveus Nosville@guyjantic Unfortunate for that argument is that they also taught AI to talk like a teenage streamer and then also like their sister
@nosville22 SON OF A ---
(this is a good point)
Tufty Indigo 🪗@guyjantic LLMs aren't conscious, but dehumanising actual people seems like an awful new level of the ongoing "this isn't real AI" goalpost-moving.
martin lentink 🇪🇺 🇺🇦📎