This article isn't actually suggesting that CEOs can be automated, it's making a modest proposal in order to point out that CEOs are overvalued and that automation is eliminating jobs for a lot of undervalued workers. Just putting that out there.
CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
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Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#32The reason we don't automate CEOs is liability: the board of directors/shareholders want someone to hold accountable when bad decisions start getting made. If you pay $4000 for a brand new iCEO that lays off your entire staff, you can really only scream at whoever minted the software making that decision, which often comes with limited liability licenses. Remember, corporate structure is about minimizing your own wor…
My new SAAS startup idea; scapegoat as a service. For a few million dollars you can hire me, put all the blame on me, I say "I take full responsibility" and resign my position.
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Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#33Because that's how you end up with paperclip maximizers? https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
Realistically though, they are supposed to be here for liability purposes. I've read of some companies decreasing CEO salaries and employing people just out of university, only to fire them a few months later to satisfy the board.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#34The reason we don't automate CEOs is liability: the board of directors/shareholders want someone to hold accountable when bad decisions start getting made. If you pay $4000 for a brand new iCEO that lays off your entire staff, you can really only scream at whoever minted the software making that decision, which often comes with limited liability licenses. Remember, corporate structure is about minimizing your own wor…
My new SAAS startup idea; scapegoat as a service. For a few million dollars you can hire me, put all the blame on me, I say "I take full responsibility" and resign my position.
this niche is apparently quite packed with individual contractors.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
To outsource something you have to be able to unambiguously specify requirements (otherwise costs blow up as you go back and forth). Once you’ve made it truly unambiguous, the next logical step is automation.
Not all automation is economically efficient - i.e. it's cheaper to hire outsourced janitors than building state of the art cleaning robots to automate their jobs.
> Not all automation is economically efficient - i.e. it's cheaper to hire outsourced janitors than building state of the art cleaning robots to automate their jobs.
And a trap many companies large enough to afford full time janitors don't realize: with outsourcing janitors they're relinquishing a lot of control towards the service provider and the work quality. The result more often than not is disgruntled employees waiting for days for stuff such as replacing a cracked toilet seat to be done.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#36At the very least, you could do a hybrid model: An AI that makes 80% of the decisions and routes 20% to a human to help guide the decision making process.
Or just a centaur model where the ai generate courses of actions and the human picks from those and/or modifies them.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#37The reason we don't automate CEOs is liability: the board of directors/shareholders want someone to hold accountable when bad decisions start getting made. If you pay $4000 for a brand new iCEO that lays off your entire staff, you can really only scream at whoever minted the software making that decision, which often comes with limited liability licenses. Remember, corporate structure is about minimizing your own wor…
My new SAAS startup idea; scapegoat as a service. For a few million dollars you can hire me, put all the blame on me, I say "I take full responsibility" and resign my position.
Years ago, Nordstrom had an employee at the store that was to be fired when a customer got super angry. They would be hauled out from the back and fired. "Fred, this lady doesn't like her pants. I believe that is your department. You're fired. Please accept our apologies, ma'am. " Then Fred would go back to the break room and read the paper until it was time to be fired again.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#38The reason we don't automate CEOs is liability: the board of directors/shareholders want someone to hold accountable when bad decisions start getting made. If you pay $4000 for a brand new iCEO that lays off your entire staff, you can really only scream at whoever minted the software making that decision, which often comes with limited liability licenses. Remember, corporate structure is about minimizing your own wor…
My new SAAS startup idea; scapegoat as a service. For a few million dollars you can hire me, put all the blame on me, I say "I take full responsibility" and resign my position.
See Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC. And then the second tier below that.
They also offer the lead-in service of making your idea into pretty slides with their logo, so it's clear later that they endorsed the idea from the get-go.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#39"If a role can be outsourced, it can be automated." I really don't see the logic in this statement.
To outsource something you have to be able to unambiguously specify requirements (otherwise costs blow up as you go back and forth). Once you’ve made it truly unambiguous, the next logical step is automation.
This is ridiculous. A spec like "grow the market cap of this company by 4x in 3 years" is entirely unambiguous, where do you even start automating it.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#40The reason we don't automate CEOs is liability: the board of directors/shareholders want someone to hold accountable when bad decisions start getting made. If you pay $4000 for a brand new iCEO that lays off your entire staff, you can really only scream at whoever minted the software making that decision, which often comes with limited liability licenses. Remember, corporate structure is about minimizing your own wor…
My new SAAS startup idea; scapegoat as a service. For a few million dollars you can hire me, put all the blame on me, I say "I take full responsibility" and resign my position.