If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.?
If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.?
CEO’s are already using AI as a tool to help them understand their companies by dumping their company data into these models as a way to understand their companies.
I just don’t see any company creating an AI to replace a CEO in its entirety, yet.
I assume rich people often keep enough shares to control who sits on the board, and thus who is the CEO. There’s a lot of people sitting on multiple boards, folks know each other, blah blah blah.
Also many shareholders aren’t really involved. I don’t even know how it works if you own shares through Vanguard or something. I’ve never been asked to vote on company policy.
From what I’ve seen in start-up land, leadership is a lot of in-group bro times. It’s all gut feel. Shouldn’t expect rational, honest, decisions from them.
They all sit on each others boards.
However it just takes a few activist board members who have big time fomo and want to be early in with a virtual CEO.
I’m sure I will be put out to pasture first, but at least I will be laughing from my cardboard box.
Solidarity doesn’t have to mean they like have a club with a secret handshake. Their goals are aligned, and they tend to work towards those goals, even without explicit coordination. It’s rare to see anyone in the ownership class work against those interests. You don’t see a lot of the owners saying “we should give people more time off” or “we should let the workers have a say”. It’s pretty consistently “we should squeeze people for more money”. It makes the news when ownership is like “We’re going to pay people more”, and it doesn’t make the news when labor is like “i’ll just work a little more off the clock to catch up”.
Contrast with labor, where people are often undermining their interests. Being anti-union, voting against regulations that would protect them from exploitation, giving away labor for free.
Every one of us is utterly replaceable, including the billionaires and multi-billionaires.
For all the status quo that they push for, they don’t actually do anything special.
You could take the average billionaire, strip them of all their worth and hand it over to some millionaire, and basically nothing would change as far as the planet is concerned.
This is not a scenario where we are all NPCs to their game. We are all players, but more to the point, they are as expendable and interchangeable as we are.
Because we know language models can’t run a business.
then maybe they’d implement the AI CEO then just retire.
I think this is the most realistic scenario. CEO outsources her workload to AI as much as possible while still collecting a paycheque.
For a publicly owned company the CEO is in the role because the Board hired them. The Board wants money but doesn’t have the attention span to run anything themselves so they get a person who can steer the ship in The Market. A bot doesn’t plan, it only reacts. That’s an interim CEO at best but not someone who has to approve budgets, product design/experience, and run the people side of things. Plus a boy hallucination could be devastating and no one would know until it’s too late.
AI just doesn’t have a place.
AI is currently really bad with business decisions. Like laughably so. There have been several small attempts, say letting an LLM manage a vending machine. I believe they’ve all flopped. Compare to performance in image creation/editing and programming performance (where, on measurables, they do relatively well). When an AI that could do this OK, you should expect to see it happen.
CEO’s are paid so much primarily because the turn to paying them in stocks. This changed because of pay-caps for executives (so to compete for CEOS, companies offered stocks). The idea was that this would align their incentives with the shareholders. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of extremely short term company policy by CEOs, spiking stock value to cash out.
Because an AI doesn’t have legal standing. It can’t own a company, close contracts, get loans, hire people nor can it sue others. It can at best act as a representative of a real CEO. There’s still a human signing on the dotted line
It also doesn’t come with daddies money and contacts to set up a startup and call investors.
Kick me in the brain stem if I’m on the wrong track, but I feel like it’s by design
In general,
Everyone hates public officials taking bribes
Everyone hates streaming services raising their subscription fees
Everyone hates advertisements
Everyone hates big pharma charging $1000 for a cancer treatment pill that costs 0.1c to manufacture
The throughline is obvious, but I feel most people just take a neutral or dismissive (and sometimes aggressive) stance if you bring it up.
It’s that cognitive dissonance that feels engineered.
I don’t know how to fix that. Admittedly, I still need to do more reading.
CEO is a political position, not a productive role. The job of the Chief Executive is to be a high level influencer with lenders, high level clients, and other business partners. For AIs to fill this role, they would need to be established as more influential than their human peers.
While its certainly possible (and arguably the desired end result of Microsoft/Google/et al) to replace a C-level with an AI, the end result would be a machine that serves the interests of the operators (presumably Microsoft/Google/whomever) rather than the business for which it is providing the service.
“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”
“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.
“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”
Lie to employees, absorb money, travel needlessly, tell everyone to RTO when they are never in the office, take a fat bonus, fire people, bullshit the board and stockholders, pull ripcord on golden parachute, lather rinse repeat.
Yeah, i think an ai could handle most of that.