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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#71

Post by Hoasi »

dijit wrote: post #54
everdrive wrote: post #11

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have. What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them. I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into…

To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#73

Post by jongjong »

dijit wrote: post #54
everdrive wrote: post #11

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have. What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them. I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into…

Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions.

This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.

Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.

I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#74

Post by ACCount37 »

socketcluster wrote: post #65

Wow the token leaderboard idea is nuts. It's similar to trying to measure the productivity of software engineers based on number of lines of code.

The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow".

Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#75

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

JTbane wrote: post #4
ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?

You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.

I still remember when I used ChatGPT the first time to write an email. I thought to myself “Oh. This sounds like 99% of the corporate communication from above”. We were joking that corporate had BossGPT for years and just didn’t tell anybody.

It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#76

Post by thewebguyd »

geraneum wrote: post #63
thewebguyd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money? This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half…

Care to share some sources that corroborate any of these claims and explains how the dots connect?

Consumption by the top 10% of earners: https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...

As for services increasingly unaffordable by the workers providing them, that's Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)

I don't have any sources regarding someone preferring humans for certain services over robots, just intuition there, and the fact that consuming human labor and time is itself a status signal of wealth, and the current growth of personal services.

As for connecting the dots, look at Brazil, one of the world's most unequal economies having a small consuming elite and a much, much larger low-wage service underclass. The gulf states as well. Granted, their circumstances don't map cleanly to a post-automation Western economy, but it does demonstrate that a largely bifurcated consumption based economy can exist and can be mildly stable.

Whether the US falls into that direction too will depending on politics. A bunch of mid-career knowledge workers aren't going to willingly to flip burgers in a service economy without some serious surveillance and oppression. But when thinking about it in those terms, the recent push for mass surveillance laws and tech along with the increasingly dangerous rhetoric around protests and "domestic terrorism" start to make sense.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#77

Post by himata4113 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

now it's closer to 95% of work can be done by AI and requires 5% mental effort, but 5% of the work requires 95% of the mental effort to finish because of all the unoptimial decisions AI has taken. I find that AI works best in small micro-service type architecture where each component has a clear goal and doesn't have interconnected parts within the same application that can break. But you do run into an issue where changes in microservice a need changes in microservice b and updating it is not ideal since it usually cascades thru the entire system or requires stacks of legacy support.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#78

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

ottoflux wrote: post #8
JTbane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.

100% been saying this for a while now. the main thing AI will be able to replace is a C suite.

I think it will handle communication between the C suit and the underlings.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#80

Post by einpoklum »

So much of this hype feels like astroturf in preparation for the upcoming IPOs:

https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/

and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.

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