Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 337 posts

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #67
noncoml wrote: post #50

It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI: A* search -> AI Backtracking -> AI Neural Networks -> AI Fuzzy Logic -> AI Genetic Algorithm -> AI Deep Learning -> AI Generative "AI" -> AI Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work. The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.

Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by lokar »

himata4113 wrote: post #77
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 c…

IME it’s possible to have good clear APIs, limited scopes/goals, etc in a normal (macro?) service. But it requires a level of discipline and process many teams are unwilling to engage in.

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

#83

Post by lokar »

mullingitover wrote: post #62
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…

> Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work. Then there's the technical debt! Shipping is frankly the easy part . It's the operating overhead that often breaks you. I liken it to free puppies.

Every line of code is a liability

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

#84

Post by not_kurt_godel »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #68
dominotw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.

He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.

Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.

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

#85

Post by slg »

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…

>convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them

And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.

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

#87

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lokar wrote: post #83
mullingitover wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work. Then there's the technical debt! Shipping is frankly the easy part . It's the operating overhead that often breaks you. I liken it to free puppies.

Every line of code is a liability

Yup. In another post, I was grumping about having to accept a truly obese bunch of code from an LLM. This particular issue is the only one I could imagine even considering accepting that much pasta, but I sort of have to, because the LLM was able to quickly solve a problem that would have taken me a couple more weeks to address.

I remember a .sig that went something along the lines of:

    I hate code, and want as little as possible in my software.

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

#88

Post by jjk166 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #74
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.

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

Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

watwut wrote: post #40
phyzix5761 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?

To be fair here, CEO dont take responsibility and dont go to jail. In rare case they do, they will be pardoned.

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by noncoml »

gowld wrote: post #67
noncoml wrote: post #50

It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI: A* search -> AI Backtracking -> AI Neural Networks -> AI Fuzzy Logic -> AI Genetic Algorithm -> AI Deep Learning -> AI Generative "AI" -> AI Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work. The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.

Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.

The point isn’t whether the aviation term "autopilot" has a technically defensible meaning, but that "Autopilot" predictably made normal people think "the car drives itself", just like "AI" now makes non-technical CEOs think "AGI employee replacement machine".

You are arguing the dictionary while I’m arguing the predictable, if not very well calculated and purposeful, misunderstanding.

Post reply on HN