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Automate the CEOs

hamiltonnolan.com

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Re: Automate the CEOs

#81

Post by graypegg »

I’m no expert in business or management, but I feel like leadership plays a very “human” role? As in, you need to wheel-and-deal favours, get people excited, inspire confidence etc. If someone was going to make me chat with a chat bot to hash out some buy-out, or some big pitch for something, I’m not taking them seriously. At least a human has the smoke screen of “friendly person”, a LLM (even if read by a human) is just too on the nose as “we’ve automated removing money from you”.

Also who do you call out when they make a bad decision? When people want blood, they want the person they’re attacking to bleed.

Re: Automate the CEOs

#82

Post by the_sleaze9 »

pydry wrote: post #30

This is like designing just the right shape of bomb to bring peace to the middle east. Neoliberal solutions dont work on the captains of the neoliberal order. If you want to bring CEOs to heel the best way to to organize, unionize and strike (if youre not a dev) or unionize and/or covertly work to rule (if you are).

Why would only software developers work-to-rule? This would be called simple sabotage. What possible gain could be derived from that? Why can't engineers unionize?

Re: Automate the CEOs

#84

Post by awegio »

bumby wrote: post #11
mxstbr wrote: post #4

…writes a person who's never been a CEO before. Which is not to say that AI won't be immensely helpful for running companies; just that once you're in the role for two days you realize that replacing that role entirely isn't going to happen. > AI can win at chess now. You think being a CEO is harder than chess? Come on. Being a CEO isn't like playing chess. Being a CEO is more like a really complex version of self-dr…

Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.

> mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy

That actually sounds a lot like model based reinforcement learning. AlphaGo still had an explicit model of a perfect information game, but newer algorithms are capable of learning the rules of games like Minecraft with very little prior information.

The problem is that the real world is still much more complicated and hard to access for machines. However, I wouldn't say it is a fundamentally different problem, but rather a matter of scale. That's part of the reason why AI research spent so much effort on building game playing systems.

Re: Automate the CEOs

#85

Post by andsoitis »

candiddevmike wrote: post #47
calvinmorrison wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of what middle management is what secretaries used to do. If I ever run my own company I will hire a team of secretaries to work with my developers and our productivity will shoot through the roof. No everyone is organized, good at scheduling, following up on things, focusing at work, interpersonal discussions, sending memos, navigating bureaucracy, etc. A great secretary allows you to focus on getting developmen…

Hire some psychologists to replace HR and you'll have people stick around forever.

> you'll have people stick around forever

that's not the goal

Re: Automate the CEOs

#86

Post by bumby »

boringg wrote: post #28
bumby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is power? It's an means to getting things done (albeit not necessarily 'doing them' yourself)

Power is the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time. Whereas energy is the ability to do work. Power is the ability to do more work, faster.

That's the engineering definition of power. The sociological definition is the ability of an group or individual to exert control or influence. (Note power in the sociological sense can also be used to prohibit 'work'. E.g., if someone is powerful in Congress, they can stop a bill that would might be more productive in the sense of the engineering definition.)

Re: Automate the CEOs

#87

Post by lordnacho »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #34
nickelcitymario wrote: post #24

Close. Automate middle management. All the things mentioned in the article really are prime candidates for automation. But that's management, not leadership. Management is primed to be automated. See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for a great take on what's possible here. Leadership is not. LLMs are great at doing the right things when there's a general consensus on what the right things are. Best practices, etc. But…

50% of what middle management is what secretaries used to do. If I ever run my own company I will hire a team of secretaries to work with my developers and our productivity will shoot through the roof. No everyone is organized, good at scheduling, following up on things, focusing at work, interpersonal discussions, sending memos, navigating bureaucracy, etc. A great secretary allows you to focus on getting developmen…

Whatever happened to secretaries anyway? Were they really cost-cut for managers to do by themselves?

You're right though, it's a valuable job being the glue of a business. In more than one way, not just work-wise. Social stuff matters too, and was often the domain of the secretaries.

Re: Automate the CEOs

#88

Post by topaz0 »

jonas21 wrote: post #43
foldr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is certainly the view of many people who aren't writers or journalists. We'll see if it plays out. Jobs do tend to appear simpler than they really are when looking in from the outside. >They did this to themselves. And who set this bad direction? The CEO. This hardly adds to the case for not replacing him with an AI.

It is also the view of many working journalists, or at least the ones I know. And it's not like some CEO decided "hey, let's pivot to churning out low-quality clickbait because I really like that stuff." They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising and the consolidation of news readership into a small number of well-known publications. Though I do agree that it's equally unfa…

> forced

Only if you consider it to be inevitable that their primary goal is to make themselves and their owners preposterously rich.

Re: Automate the CEOs

#90

Post by andsoitis »

ceejayoz wrote: post #37
andsoitis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that in many cases, CEOs are often selected by, and their remuneration awarded by, boards made up of incestuous groupings of people who rely on each other in the same way. Can you give one or two examples?

Take a look at the bios on https://ir.homedepot.com/corporate-governance/board-of-direc... for an example. They're all C-suite folks from other large corporations; Marriott, United Technologies, American Airlines, etc.

What makes it "incestuous"?
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