The Cyberneticist
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Oh no, our competitors are doing stupid things! We must also do stupid things or be left out!
— CEOs everywhere.
✧✦Catherine✦✧> "leader"
> look inside
> follows everyone else
Jeff Forcier
God Emperor of Mastodon@david_chisnall TBF, as long as Wallstreet promotes stupid shit, its CEO"s job to do stupid shit. The system is rigged for stupidity.
synlogic4242@david_chisnall nailed it
Cegorach@david_chisnall it's called the buran-principle
FelichsThe real problem is the makets pile in to the first company that does it, so everyone else by default has to join in.
The CEOs need metrics they can make pretty graphs to put in shareholder reports, so you end up with "use ai" mandates.
If share price goes up throughout any part of this process the CEO has made a "rational" and "correct" decision according to the people that write the CEOs cheques.
Layoffs arev the default cost saving tool.../cont'd
...so you can bank on announcements citing ai led productivity gains, and then later as necessary survival measures as ai led productivity gains fail to meet expectations.
Rehiring later will be quitely done.
By then, the CEOs have met targets, given shareholders what they want, and taken their bonuses. Its literally win-win for those in the game. The rest of us aren't even pawns in the game, as pawns have some value. We factor as an expendable commodity.
SpaceLifeForm
Flaming Cheeto@david_chisnall
Past examples include
- off-shoring many things
- re-shoring a good portion of those things
- hiring McKenzie or Bain as cover for your layoffs
- putting most of your data in "the cloud"
- pulling back the most vital of that data
- making and maintaining platform apps instead of a really good website
- using a closed 3rd party platform as the primary conduit to your customers, vendors, and partners.
- donating to a presidential inauguration
- TQM, 6 sigma, KPIs, ABM, HBR TLAs
Past examples include
- off-shoring many things
- re-shoring a good portion of those things
- hiring McKenzie or Bain as cover for your layoffs
- putting most of your data in "the cloud"
- pulling back the most vital of that data
- making and maintaining platform apps instead of a really good website
- using a closed 3rd party platform as the primary conduit to your customers, vendors, and partners.
- donating to a presidential inauguration
- TQM, 6 sigma, KPIs, ABM, HBR TLAs
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud@PizzaDemon @david_chisnall 6 sigma still makes me twitch.
CynBlogger™️Resists Tyranny!@david_chisnall
I think a great marketing strategy about now for almost any product or service would be, “ABSOLUTELY NO AI USED OR SOLD!”
I think a great marketing strategy about now for almost any product or service would be, “ABSOLUTELY NO AI USED OR SOLD!”
Paul_IPv6every mom ever: "if everyone else were jumping off a bridge, would you jump off too?"
every CEO: "it's the new trend! jump or be left behind! jumping i go!"
datarama@paul_ipv6 @david_chisnall This is why I've always suggested people say things like "so easy, even your CEO could use it" rather than the more common one.
@paul_ipv6 @david_chisnall (footnote: I *might* be biased, given that my mum taught me to code, way back when. :) )
Wendy Nather@datarama @paul_ipv6 @david_chisnall Another mom here. I think you have the right kind of bias. (I learned to code 50 years ago.)
Antonio Patriarca@paul_ipv6 @david_chisnall Indeed, I’m increasingly convinced the reason CEO are convinced AI may substitute everyone is that it can surely substitute their work and they think they are god so clearly it should be able to substitute everybody else. After all they are paid as thousands of them.
@david_chisnall Profits? My sheer brilliance, of course. Losses? Market forces, obviously.
The Orange Theme@david_chisnall And a lot of ketamine.
wonofone 🍉@david_chisnall just like moderate Democrats
Hausgeist@david_chisnall It's cute how you think CEOs to be capable of recognizing them as stupid things before also doing the things.
sila@david_chisnall i think ur chip needs more ai accelerators
webhat@david_chisnall it was once explained to me that shareholders can sue the company if they don't do these bad things, so many companies are scared of not doing bad thing, otherwise they might be sued by people who don't understand that doing the bad thing, that all the other companies are doing, is bad
It also means that shareholders could potentially sue Anthropic, because the consequence of not removing the completely autonomous restrictions for the US military, so AI be used to autonomously murder people, resulted in these shareholders potentially losing future earnings
@webhat This is repeated a lot, but has almost no basis in fact.
Shareholders can sue if the company fails to disclose known business risks (I expect a lot of these lawsuits once the bubble bursts, because most companies know that they are pissing money down the drain and are lying to their shareholders). For example, when I was at Microsoft, I was told that the lawyers said that releasing Copilot without a mechanism to attribute output to sources in the training data was high risk and would expose the company to significant liability but Kevin Scott overrode the,. I was not in the room when this was discussed, so I don’t know if it’s true. If it is then that would be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit.
If the company fails to do something that shareholders believe will increase value, they can vote to replace members of the board, who can then vote to replace the senior leadership. But if shareholders believe the company strategy is wrong, their primary recourse is to sell their shares, they don’t have grounds for a lawsuit (if they did, companies would be sued all the time by crackpots who thing not investing in the Time Cube is a missed opportunity).
The big worry for a lot of companies is that shareholders will sell. Public companies raise capital by slowly diluting their stock. If a company’s share price is growing 10% a year and they issue 1% new stock, that gets absorbed in the growth and lets them realise 1% of their market cap each year. For a billion dollar company, that’s $10,000,000 of, effectively, free money. That pays a lot of salaries or funds a lot of capital investment. But it’s possible only because the stock price is going up. Once it starts going down, issuing more stock makes it drop even faster.
@david_chisnall thanks for clarifying