I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO delegated. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point.
There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO.
I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day.
The article quotes:
> "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees.
If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.
Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it.
My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters.
I think part of the idea here is that we’re not talking about putting GPT-4o in charge of a company, we’re talking about GPT-7a (for “agent”). By the time we get to that turn of the game, we may not have as many issues with hallucinations and context size will be immense. At a certain point the AI will be able to consume and work with far more information that the human CEO who “employs” it, to the point that the human CEO essentially becomes a rubber stamp, as interactions like the following play out over and over again:
AI: I am proposing an organizational restructuring of the company to improve efficiency.
CEO: What sort of broad philosophy are you using to guide this reoorg?
AI: None. This week I interviewed every employee and manager for thirty minutes to assemble a detailed picture of the company’s workings. I have the names of the 5272 employees who have been overpromoted relative to their skill, the 3652 who are underpromoted or are on the wrong teams, 2351 who need to be fired in the next year. Would you like me to execute on this plan or read you all the rationales?
CEO (presumably after the AI has been right about many things before): Yeah OK just go ahead and execute.
Like, we’re talking about a world where CEOs are no longer making high level “the ship turns slowly” decisions based on heuristics, but a world where CEO AIs can make millions of highly informed micro-decisions that it would normally be irresponsible for a CEO to focus on. All while maintaining a focus on a handful of core tenets.
> I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction).
The vast majority of articles about CEOs are populist rage-bait. The goal isn't to portray the actual duties and responsibilities of a CEO. The goal is to feed anti-CEO sentiment which is popular on social media. It's to get clicks.
Do CEOs have much responsibility though? I've only ever seen them punished when they've done something intensely illegal and even then they get off for lighter crimes usually.
Golden handshakes mean if they move on they win. They can practically suck a company dry & move on to another one thru MBA social circles.
I feel like my CEO is already an AI - gradient descent to optimize stock price for the near future and using as many trending buzzwords as possible in any communications and investor calls.
> “Someone who is already quite advanced in their career and is already fairly self-motivated may not need a human boss anymore,” said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. “In that case, software for self-management can even enhance worker agency.”
This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.
The problem is that, based on personal observation, many, many current managers are actively bad at helping groups of people work together effectively. As in, I have personally known managers (not my own; this is as a third party, and I've been genuinely lucky in my managers over the years) whose teams would be better off with them simply removed from the picture and nothing else changed, they are that detrimental to getting work done.
> It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.
Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers:
1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside.
2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.
Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties.
Over time, as with the King/Queen of England, they will become less necessary.
Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team.
Can AIs use spreadsheets yet?
I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.
I’m imagining a Dilbert comic a company composed of self organized employees, all working from home, with a four day work week and amazing benefits with the comfort of no non competes, taking a long term view on creating shareholder value.
Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco.
What's your job, and why haven't you hired a team of people from a cheaper country to do your job for less than they're paying you? The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job.
The only way this will happen is if the shareholders realize that they can save money, and generate even more profit for them. Perhaps we need to demonstrate this experimentally and compare the results to CEO's in similar industries. Then watch as it is immediately and resoundingly banned through legislation and rhetoric.
The capital markets are a type of AI, or a least a collective intelligence that is optimized for specific, short term outcomes. If you are a CEO of a large enterprise that relies on equity or debt financing, you don't actually have a lot of agency.
My dad really disliked his former boss at his job. He eventually started calling this boss “VPGPT”, since he was quite confident that this boss could be completely replaced with ChatGPT a year ago without anyone even noticing.
There are companies registered in the UK where all of the company officers are other companies. I don't know if this is legal (the registrar, Companies House, is notoriously lax) but it's definitely a thing.
If nothing else a company that is more like a collection of independent guilds or co-ops marshaled by a higher AI level would be really interesting. No idea if it would win in the market. Management presumably does a lot of work, somehow, but if you look at their salaries as a budget, is seems like there’s some pretty significant headroom?
That is the path to saving civilization. Get petty selfish ignorant people out of the decision loop. We are monkey-troop-level thinkers and that puts a hard limit on how complex a civilization we can build. The only way forward is to automate some of this, with the selfishness and clannishness removed.
The article compares CEO's and calculators. If the job of a CEO can be automated, then we each have a CEO in our pocket. Just like we each have a calculator in our pocket. What interesting things would you do if you had Steve Jobs in your pocket?
Of course CEOs can be replaced with AI. Elon Musk proves that it’s not a full time or even a part time job with a solid amount of hours. He “runs” 4 companies and still has time to argue with strangers on the Internet. And he has the gall to ask for a compensation package that equates to $10,000 for each automobile Tesla ever sold.
Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives?
Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified.
It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors?
I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for anything?
It's both unethical and foolish to outsource meaningful decision making to AI.
Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.
CEOs have three responsibilities that I doubt an AI will ever do. 1. Ensure the company has money to operate. 2. Recruit and inspire employees to do their best work collectively. 3. Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.
Arn't AIs already capable of 1 and 3? Seems like 1 is easily solved with linear regression, not AI really even needed. What is the slope of operating costs, what is the slope of revenue? Is revenue greater than operating costs? 3, well arn't people already trying to have AI solve problems where there isn't concrete data? The only difference is, there is a human between the machine and the levers. ChatGPT will give me a decision, the only thing it can't do right now is enact that decision.
Addition: Hell, it could probably solve 2. LLM that does sentiment analysis. Sentiment drops below a certain level, the model knows to put in an order for Dominos for a company pizza party, since this is about as much morale boasting as most employees get.
”Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.”
I still wonder if this is something AI will ever be able to do, or if it’s much harder than we suspect and at least several more AI winters away.
It’s basically the is/ought problem, where the theory is that one cannot get to what one “ought” to do based only on what “is”.
Like we might say “it is cold outside, therefore you ought to put on a coat”. But, should you? Maybe you enjoy the cold, or maybe you live in an area ruled by a street gang and your coat is the wrong color and you risk being shot if you wear it outside.
AI could eventually make a much more informed recommendation, with more context, but at some point it begs the question of how close the model needs to get to reality, which obviously has some limit.
Could you provide a few examples of CEOs bearing responsibility in practice?
And just to be clear: I don't think we should be considering paying yourself an obscenely high exit bonus after you fucked up as "bearing responsibility".
what fantasy land are you living in? Look at the auto industry, many examples of companies covering up defects which lead to deaths - how many CEOs are in jail? What about the tabacco industry? The company may get fined and please don't try to make some round about argument like that hurts the CEO, even if the company gets fined they're still living in their castles.
[+] [-] goles|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] norseboar|1 year ago|reply
There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO.
I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day.
The article quotes:
> "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees.
If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.
[+] [-] bartread|1 year ago|reply
Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it.
My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters.
Why wouldn't you want this?
[+] [-] Uehreka|1 year ago|reply
AI: I am proposing an organizational restructuring of the company to improve efficiency.
CEO: What sort of broad philosophy are you using to guide this reoorg?
AI: None. This week I interviewed every employee and manager for thirty minutes to assemble a detailed picture of the company’s workings. I have the names of the 5272 employees who have been overpromoted relative to their skill, the 3652 who are underpromoted or are on the wrong teams, 2351 who need to be fired in the next year. Would you like me to execute on this plan or read you all the rationales?
CEO (presumably after the AI has been right about many things before): Yeah OK just go ahead and execute.
Like, we’re talking about a world where CEOs are no longer making high level “the ship turns slowly” decisions based on heuristics, but a world where CEO AIs can make millions of highly informed micro-decisions that it would normally be irresponsible for a CEO to focus on. All while maintaining a focus on a handful of core tenets.
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
The vast majority of articles about CEOs are populist rage-bait. The goal isn't to portray the actual duties and responsibilities of a CEO. The goal is to feed anti-CEO sentiment which is popular on social media. It's to get clicks.
[+] [-] fennecfoxy|1 year ago|reply
Golden handshakes mean if they move on they win. They can practically suck a company dry & move on to another one thru MBA social circles.
[+] [-] siliconc0w|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mateus1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hodgesrm|1 year ago|reply
This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.
[+] [-] danaris|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers:
1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside.
2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team.
Can AIs use spreadsheets yet?
I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.
[+] [-] lefstathiou|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|1 year ago|reply
Dilbert S1E2
Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/
[+] [-] JohnFen|1 year ago|reply
However, I doubt it could replace a CEO. The reason for my doubt is that being CEO is primarily a social job.
[+] [-] ImHereToVote|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] geod_of_ix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bparsons|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] u32480932048|1 year ago|reply
Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.
[+] [-] masfuerte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] booleandilemma|1 year ago|reply
I could see an LLM arguing for personhood and our lawmakers being dumb enough to agree with it.
[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytim...
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cdme|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sandspar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|1 year ago|reply
Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives?
Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified.
It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors?
I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for anything?
[+] [-] simonw|1 year ago|reply
Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.
[+] [-] nomad-nigiri|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tcmart14|1 year ago|reply
Addition: Hell, it could probably solve 2. LLM that does sentiment analysis. Sentiment drops below a certain level, the model knows to put in an order for Dominos for a company pizza party, since this is about as much morale boasting as most employees get.
[+] [-] darth_avocado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] halfcat|1 year ago|reply
I still wonder if this is something AI will ever be able to do, or if it’s much harder than we suspect and at least several more AI winters away.
It’s basically the is/ought problem, where the theory is that one cannot get to what one “ought” to do based only on what “is”.
Like we might say “it is cold outside, therefore you ought to put on a coat”. But, should you? Maybe you enjoy the cold, or maybe you live in an area ruled by a street gang and your coat is the wrong color and you risk being shot if you wear it outside.
AI could eventually make a much more informed recommendation, with more context, but at some point it begs the question of how close the model needs to get to reality, which obviously has some limit.
[+] [-] nsguy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] potterken|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] atoav|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] slt2021|1 year ago|reply
AI cannot bear responsibility, so who is going to take a blame if AI does a very bad job?
[+] [-] bell-cot|1 year ago|reply
When the AI screws up - the Board will loudly blame it, then watch as the SecTeam installs a new AI CEO.
[+] [-] bitcharmer|1 year ago|reply
And just to be clear: I don't think we should be considering paying yourself an obscenely high exit bonus after you fucked up as "bearing responsibility".
[+] [-] freejazz|1 year ago|reply
Didn't seem to be a question any AI proponent asked when they said that AI can do the job of a lawyer. Not that I disagree with you.
[+] [-] wmf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
It takes a very convoluted definition of "work" to be able to say that CEOs aren't doing any work.
Being a CEO (a real one of a real company of more than a few people that has real customers) is a huge amount of work.
[+] [-] mdgrech23|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jncfhnb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deeviant|1 year ago|reply
Namely, lay off an bunch of employees then talk about "difficult headwinds" or some such thing?