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Hacker News Hacker NewsIf anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.
You might as well ask why people don’t use AI pickup coaches.
Don't steal this idea it's mine I'm going to sell it for a million dollars.
The entire job is almost entirely human to human tasks: the salesmanship of selling a vision, networking within and without the company, leading the first and second line executives, collaborating with the board, etc.
What are people thinking CEOs do all day? The "work" work is done by their subordinates. Their job is basically nothing but social finesse.
The real job is done behind the curtain. Picking up key people based on their reputation, knowledge, agency, and loyalty. Firing and laying off people. Organizational design. Cutting the losses. Making morally ambiguous decisions. Decisions based on conversations that are unlikely to ever be put into bytes.
Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
It would be an interesting experiment to promote an executive assistant to CEO though.
I swear there’s a joke or cautionary tale here somewhere about “first they came for..” or something along those lines. The phrasing escapes me.
Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t automate a CEO, it’s that the actual tangible work just isn’t worth as much as some companies pay for it, and this thread it touching a few too many raw nerves.
Well, either way it’s hilarious.
My business experience is that company culture is very important to a company’s success and I’m just doubtful that this can be created through AI.
For the soft CEO skills, not so much.
Not that that's a deal-breaker. I have a vision of an AI CEO couched as a "strategic thought partner," which the wet-CEO just puppets to grease the skids of acceptance among the employees.
I'd fully trust an AI CEO's decision making, for a predictable business, at least. But some CEOs get paid a lot (deservedly so) because they can make the right decisions in the thick fog of war. Hard to get an AI to make the right decision on something that wasn't in the training corpus.
Still, business strategy isn't as complex as picking winners in the stock market.
I have zero idea what most CEOs that I've worked for do ... and the seem to want it that way.
Every year I feel a bit less crazy in my silly armchair speculation that the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix is a good documentary. If AI "takes over" it will be via economic means and people will go willingly until they have gradually relinquished control of the world to something alien. (Landian philosophers make the case that hyperstitional capitalism has already done this)
I would take the over that this will happen sooner than later -- when it's proven to make a lot of money to have an AI CEO, suddenly everyone will change their tune and jump on the bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes, completely ignoring what they are giving up.
Except unlike e.g. the metaverse/cryptocurrency bandwagon of yesteryear, there's no getting off.
Also, I think it misses the critical point. C-suite executives operate under immense pressure to deliver abstract business outcomes, but the lack of clear, immediate feedback loops and well-defined success metrics makes their roles resistant to automation. AI needs concrete reward functions that executive decision-making simply doesn't provide.
1. I will take five automated CEOs. If I can split my company into five distinct companies (one per product), it would be amazing. We are splitting the company into two to streamline focus on different/incompatible industries, and I am dreading the process of finding another CEO. It is very, very hard.
2. I know a lot of CEOs. It helps. I didn't know a single one when I started. It is no more a cult than my programmer's peer group was.
3. Did I tell you how hard it is to find a good CEO? It is VERY, VERY hard. Think of hiring a great product guy with agency to do whatever needs to be done, with people skills to attract talent, a sales drive, and a willingness to deal with finance & legal. Oh, and I am in the tech field, so I need him to be very hardcore technical. Your mileage might vary, but this is who I need. Anyone who has that is running their own companies. Oh, and the person has to have a proven track record. I cannot let someone unproven ruin the company and well-being of hundreds of employees and tens of thousands of customers.
4. I don't believe CEOs are special in any way other than that most other professionals are special. There are probably some underlying qualities, but they're all so different.
5. Some CEOs got there because they were lucky, but they didn't stay there for long because of luck. It is very, very simple to screw up as a CEO.
6. Growing someone within an organization to become a CEO is very hard. We are trying - giving some people more and more responsibilities, trying to involve them in more and more aspects of the organization. The filter is - repeatable success. You don't have to succeed all the time, but you have to succeed most of the time. Most people don't want the pressure, aren't interested in certain aspects, or are unsuccessful more often than they should.
7. Boards are not a cult as well; they don't have CEO's back. Boards are represented by investors (pension funds, wealthy individuals, etc.) - they will oust the CEO if the company's performance suffers. They are willing to pay a lot to the CEO because ... it is so hard to find a good CEO.
if (marketCrash) then sendEmailToGovernmentAskingForBailout();
An even more interesting one is: What will we reward?
We've been rewarding labor quantity, as well as quality via higher wages - as motivation and as incentives for more education. This reflected the productivity primacy of knowledge work in modern economies, but that might not be the case down the road.
We've also been rewarding capital. Originally this was a way for the elites to keep themselves in place (a.k.a. economic rents), but in modern times it's been more of an entrepreneurial incentive (a.k.a. economic profits.)
Without the economic profit rationale, there's no reason to reward capital accumulation. Only pro-profit decisions are good for society, pro-rent decisions are awful. If there's no profit to incentivize, capitalism is just bad all around.
If AI becomes a better profit decision-maker than an entrepreneur, any humans left in the loop are nothing but high-rollers gambling with everyone else's money.
It’s been tried before, it didn’t work out well.
Whatever the merits of the argument here (and my bolshie side has also flippantly pushed it in the past) the motivation and thrust of the essay needs to be considered in that ideological grounding.
The main job of CEOs is not decision making. 99% of company decisions are made below the level of CEO. For the ones that make it to CEO, the board tends to have final say.
It’s a leadership role where people interactions are the most important. The CEO sets the tone, gets people on the same page, and is the external face of the company.
It’s silly to think a robot can replace that.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943218
The investors can organize the government bailouts themselves. You don't need a CEO.
If you've ever worked at a company that's a chaotic shitshow, you'll know how strong the effect of the CEO is - it always comes down to the guy at the top not being up to it.
The leverage of the role is enormous, and the strength of someone who can carry out this role well for a large company is sky high - not many such people in the world, and they only need one.
So the math all comes out very straightforward: even at obscene looking salaries, they're still a bargain.
Could be good, but could also be bad if it turns out the AI is able to be even more ruthless in how it treats its workforce.
The good news is that it doesn't need to be very accurate in order to beat the performance of most execs anyways.
but as someone who has the honor of working witha really good ceo i can definitely say that you cannot automate them. maybe in some streamlined corporate machine like ibm or something, but not in a living growing company
Because building psychopathic AI's is - at the moment - still frowned upon.
This is how successful American propaganda is. 39% of people believed something that definitionally could never be true.
So you will find people who make average salaries defending the stratospheric salaries of CEOs because they believe they'll one day be the one benefitting or they've fallen for some sort of propaganda such as the myth of meritocracy or prosperity gospel.
Our entire economy is designed around exploiting working people and extracting all of their wealth to a tiny portion of the population. And we're reachign the point where the bottom 50% (if not more) have nothing left to exploit.
Ai and automation could be used to improve all of our lives. It isn't and it won't be. It'll be used to suppress wages and displace workers so this massive wealth transfer can be accelerated.
I get the point of the article. But those with the wealth won't let themselves be replaced by AI and seemingly the populace will never ask the question of why they can't be replaced until economic conditiosn deteriorate even further.