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CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

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Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#341

Post by styren »

goatherders wrote: post #37
cdirkx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a link where I can read more about this? Nothing came up from my googling.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#342

Post by Graffur »

I'll go against the common thought here. CEO pay is ridiculous. They can only pay that much because the workers have to work to pay their mortgage and pay for their health concerns. Noone would agree to making other people rich otherwise. The whole system is a mess and ready to be disrupted.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#343

Post by 0-_-0 »

makapuf wrote: post #300
koonsolo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, take away the CEO and see what happens. It can't be that hard. You don't know any companies without CEO's? Exactly!

Let me take away your keyboard and let's see how you fare at c++ or Javascript.

If someone dies in you family you can still write a printf statement. Without a keyboard you can't. Bad analogy.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#344

Post by CRConrad »

newsbinator wrote: post #218
hh3k0 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree, in German we have an idiom "Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her" ("a fish rots from the head down") to describe precisely how bad management cause ripples all the way down. That being said, CEOs are still prime candidates for automatization. I mean, surely nobody wants to replace good CEOs with bad software but rather with equally or better performing software equivalents. Additionally, one day it might be easi…

I google'd around and I can't find anything conclusive about whether a fish literally rots from the head down. I'd be curious if it's merely an expression or a true thing about fish.

At a guess (a wild-ass one, I admit): Some of the softest, most porous tissue of a fish, with the highest surface-area-to-volume ratio, and most exposed to the environment with all its microbes -- as opposed to most of their flesh, that is contained within skin and scales -- are the gills. So it feels very plausible that the gills are the first bit of a dead fish that would start to rot.

Well, those or the guts, of course: Assuming fish have an intestinal microflora like land animals, their guts would have a head start on rotting (Heh!) over even the gills. But I guess that's where skin-and-scales-as-container comes in again, only the other way around: the possibly rotting guts are hidden away inside the critter, so not as immediately noticeable as any rot starting from the gills up at the head.

This is all my private speculation, though, and most probably influenced by (i.e, my self-rationalisation of) precisely the saying you're enquiring about.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#345

Post by CRConrad »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #227
makapuf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this shows that a dysfunctional CEO (for completely understandable reasons) leads to a nonprofitable firm, not that value is added. You could say that people with no or defective keyboard have a hard time programming, but the best keyboard does not add significant value to a developer.

Isn't the assumption here that if they didn't provide any value then a death in their family shouldn't affect the company?

Seems like an illogical assumption. What it shows is just that having a dysfunctional (again, quite understandable in this case!) CEO can subtract value, which is not the same as an ordinary one adding any. Maybe Tom Hanks's pal Mr Wilson would work just as well as all the other ones.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#346

Post by CRConrad »

visarga wrote: post #176
CPLX wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with CEO pay, as well as pay for fund managers, is basically the same. It's clearly understood as a principal/agent problem, to use economics jargon.[0] Here's how it works: 1) Money is invested in companies by a diffuse set of investors. That diffuse group is unified and the decisions are made by people responsible for managing money. 2) They invest it with the intention of having it go into the productive…

> at the end of the day what is happening is that the people who are responsible for distributing resources to a common enterprise are taking more and more of it and keeping it I bet you think business is a zero sum game.

Hopefully they do, because it is.

I bet you think the economy is the same as "a business".

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#347

Post by fighterpilot »

niceairport wrote: post #329
fighterpilot wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job of a CEO would need AGI because it's the type of job that requires understanding of human social dynamics, market context, regulatory context, etc. Such cross domain multi faceted expertise is the type of thing that needs general and broad intelligence to do effectively. Hire people, fire people, pitch investors, manage direct reports across multiple business lines, understand what's going on in the world and…

I have mixed feelings between your response and the response you are replying to. One one hand I can clearly see how what you're saying makes sense. On the other, I still am inclined to believe that if you really distilled the actual purpose of everything you mentioned, it could be formulated in a way that doesn't require AGI.

I think one thing to consider is the non-stationary distributions in the problem space.

We may be able to formulate our current understanding of what it takes to be a CEO in every feasible future context that we can imagine, and create an agent (not an AGI) that does that.

But then what would happen when the distributions change out of sample in an unforseeable way? Suppose two countries go to war and this drastically changes the operating environment of the business. The agent would need to learn how to operate with human-level capability in this novel environment which it wasn't trained specifically to do. That's why I'm thinking it requires an AGI.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#348

Post by rybosworld »

gtyras2mrs wrote: post #340
koonsolo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange reasoning: "Show me a person without a car". "Here you go, this person has 3". So 3 founders are running the company, nothing special about that. Please show me a company without a CEO.

Doesn't seem like 'strange reasoning' at all. Since the comment was like 'having only 1 driver is likely to be a liability', to which you responded 'show me a vehicle with no drivers' and you got a response saying 'this vehicle has 3 drivers' The strange reasoning is taking the the statement that said "just one driver could be a liability" and asking for vehicles with no drivers.

Not to mention the person you are replying to edited their comment after the fact (possibly as I was replying). It originally said something to the effect of "show me a company without a CEO". Which I think is significant, as I took "A" to mean "singular".

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#349

Post by [deleted] »

clairity wrote: post #253
hammock wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But it's generally common knowledge. Here are some articles https://fortune.com/2019/08/20/stock-buybacks-debt-financed/ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin... https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11393 From the last one: "Data on the percentage of buybacks that are leveraged are inconsistent. For example, the bank J.P. Morgan Chase reported that leveraged buybacks accounted f…

this is another one of those things you learn in business school, a commonly disdained yet imminently useful education, particularly for engineers.

[deleted]

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#350

Post by jl2718 »

jordanpg wrote: post #207

I would love it if someone could explain to me like I'm 5, why it is exactly, that CEOs are so highly paid. I get that it's hard. I get that there are long hours. I get that it requires long-term strategic thinking. None of that helps me understand O(100M) "compensation." I'm pretty sure that executives get paid so much because of (a) their rolodex (ie. their ability to get certain people on the phone) and (b) becaus…

Most responses are trying to tell you why they ‘deserve’ their pay. True or not, this is irrelevant. CEO pay is set by the board in the same vote that sets their own compensation. ‘The company’ is not a sentient being. Nobody is looking out for its best interests.

5-year-olds from most cultures would have a hard time understanding this because it breaks their understanding from adult-child stewardship.

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