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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8... There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you l…

“We are sure it will work because it’s never been tried!” I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there.

This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with.

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

#132

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?

While I agree that AIs would do a good job… Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?

A robot with access to all of the company data and mediocre decision making wouldn’t be terrible.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

What are the concrete benefits? Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?

Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share.

I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We are sure it will work because it’s never been tried!” I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there.

This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with.

No.

There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system.

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

#136

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…

> 90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work. Don't think I've heard that one but certainly rings true to my experience. Reminds me of "ninety percent of the game is half mental"

I've heard it as "once you think you're 90% done, you're really halfway done."

Tangential: it's always made me wonder about teams that believe "80% effort" is optimal.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with.

No. There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system.

Could you quote that? I don’t see it.

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

#138
I saw someone on Xitter say "Any CEO who wants to replace jobs with AI should first have to replace their own assistant with AI" and I think that's the perfect rule. Every AI demo is some version of a personal assistant, surely AI can do that job right?

I think we'd get zero volunteers from CEOs who have assistants.

(Note: this is not meant to be an insult to human assistants! I think they do a valuable job and should not be replaced by AI either).

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?

No, look at functioning democracies. They don't need authoritarian rulers, only those that want to be authoritarians argue elsewise.

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

#140
Early in my career I read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Between that book Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and Humphrey's "Managing the Software Process" it seemed that there was hope for the software industry learning some necessary lessons and growing to become a true engineering discipline. Nope. Never happened. The industry standard, despite improvements in some areas, is still a farcical shitshow with little beyond lipservice to process, predictability or proper self-evaluation. I can only describe agile, as it is practised, more of a coping mechanism than an actual methodology. Indeed the methodology is embodied mostly in the infrastructure; issue tracking, version control, code review, continuous integration with as little methodology glue between them as required to produce output.

Modern first and second tier software management seems less professional, is contributing less and is generally worse than it was twenty years ago. The quality of the engineering and program managers, their training and commitment to their craft seems really low and is not generally valued. On average team level software management has gotten worse rather than better and, given what is expected and how it is valued, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It is truly disappointing that what could have been a valuable and productivity enhancing role became so useless.

Things aren't going to change for the better though until the dust settles somewhat on the role of AI in software and systems development and we start again to consider how software should be developed in the 21st century. Maybe it is possible that with AI doing most of the low-level work that the focus will change to building and maintaining architecture and systems. Many programmers might become more like traditional engineers doing a lot more systems work than they do today and continuing to solve problems. Lord knows though it won't be today's software management doing this work; they have nothing in the way of skills to offer to the problem.

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