The rich have class solidarity. They’re not going to casually fuck each other over like that.
But they’re controlled by shareholders and why do shareholders want individual nut jobs running a company when and AI can do it. Not saying we’re any where close to AI that can do this. But the idea is neat. CEO of these publicly traded companies seems like the first job that should be axed.
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.
there is no rationale to capitalism, it’s more like a heist
It’s one of the most rationale things there is
Chances are the shareholders with enough power to sway things are… Other CEOs though
I don’t really buy this take. They have petty spats, noncompetitive practices, just like the rest of us. Seems like there are simpler explanations.
Solidarity doesn’t mean they’re all in love and never squabble. But it does mean that they will prioritize their class’ interests, especially if it’s in conflict with labor.
Real answer: because the CEO is the figurehead of the company. An AI can do exactly what a CEO can do except actually interacting with people. So the only necessary and “irreplaceable” job of the CEO is to meet with people and get them to make a deal or invest or whatever.
That being said, I don’t think there’s any job an LLM can replace a human for. Human’s aren’t hired as next word predictors. Even the CEO has more to their decision making job than making decisions. Knowing what decisions to make is something the AI can’t do.
CEOs are overpaid though. Their jobs aren’t hard and mostly what determines their success is luck.
You’d have to be able to program the AI to do a job so the first thing is figuring out what the hell a CEO actually does.
Schedule meetings, attend meeting, tell others to do stuff. Profit.
“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?”
It’s gotta be said, Zaphod kind of had a point there.
Because they don’t actually care about “speed” or “efficiency”. All they care about is having all the money. Every decision they make is in service of that goal, including what words they say in public.
You see productivity gains have nothing to do with AI. It’s being pushed down our throats because some elites have vested interest in its success and it’s another way to extract more money from the consumers.
Catching crime lords in hypocritical pretzel logic doesn’t work. The issue isn’t with their logic. The issue is with a society that allows itself to be captured by capitalism.
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.
I think our problem might be starting a slave empire on stolen land and then building a bunch of prisons instead of a society. Maybe next time, don’t be born 17 generations into a crumbling colonial slave empire. That’s what I’m going to try.
I think that middle management has more to worry about.
This is possible and much easier than with the people who usually do the actual work that makes a company sucessfull.
For example, this chinese company has done it and performs very well: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html
Its likely the only use case that would actually pay off and it makes sense as the board of directors can have it made and maybe even do a lot of chief and vp stuff.
Because they’re the decision makers, why would they remove themselves from that position? Lol
For a publicly traded business, this could greatly benefit the share holder with a more efficient AI CEO to steer the ship.
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 run a business OK exists, 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.
Get out of here with your sensible economic logic. The answer is obviously because CEOs and shareholders are catagorically evil, and make all their descisions with the sole intent of making my life miserable.
Now there is an idea. But the money that the CEO would be paid would go to workers right? Right?!
