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CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

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Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#671
post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who think everything is a group vs. group war naturally interpret everything as a move within that war, including non-participants' correct observation that it doesn't really exist outside of the minds of the small segment of paranoiacs choosing to engage it.

You ignore the pawns on the chess board, don't ya

I'm ignoring the entire chess board, in fact, because the stuff that's going out outside of the chess game is much more important -- to me, and to most other people who aren't involved in the chess game.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#672
post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Understand human nature, incentives, and complex systems like markets and how they produce incentives. We do. "Class war" is just the succinct phrasing for "people who earn money through capital returns have vastly different incentives than people who earn money from their labor, and they also have the means to turn those interests into political leverage".

Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives. When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible. The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happe…

> If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one.

How true is this? Certainly trust busters like Teddy had a lot of political power. Though I wouldn't call them a new capital class.

> Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives.

You're advocating for political consumerism? I suppose it has some use alongside boycotts and the "buy made-in-the-USA" movements of old. Sadly today the label is so watered down I doubt one can reasonably know whether any given purchase has any significant manufacturing or resources from within the USA. Ultimately we have to pull all the levers to enact change. Because the top 1% certainly isn't holding back.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#673
post #467

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like…

> I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people . That kind of thing j…

Yes, I agree. I think what people are maybe not considering is that while the aspects of the job can technically be automated, them being performed by a human cannot. As a human, you get special privileges. You can get more information out of people, you can be persuasive, you can be charming, you can compromise.

I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM, and that's the issue. They want a real person they can talk to and see eye-to-eye with. It's the same all the way up to CEOs.

Sure you can have the automated CEO, but who will want to work with them? Won't they just... treat them like a stupid robot, like how we treat computers? Treat them as a tool to accomplish their own motivations? I mean, I never consider if I'm hurting my keyboard when I mash away. So how would an AI CEO actually work, without at least SOME fleshy face behind in front of it?

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#674
post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the categories here are truly a priori , then it seems strange to mistrust them? Maybe you mean a posteriori? I think I get the angle here, but the whole thing about a single category/classification/abstraction against a continuum is that it doesn't need to speak to or predict the entire continuum, or to every quality and aspiration of one of its members. One set of things, "those items which have X", need not exc…

> As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work? Sure. What I'm pointing out is that using the concept of social class as the lens through which you analyze all human social interaction, and draw conclusions about the entire fundamenta…

Do you have health insurance?

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#675
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if that is the main value add. I have repeatedly heard that taking responsibility and being on the hook for the decisions (even if AI hands you the decision and all the research and homework that went into it) is the most important feature. I guess starting with and/or developing a good network is one of the main ways they can gain the confidence for taking responsibility.

I have yet to see a CEO actually take responsibility for anything. Its always some hand-wavey talk about strategy and unexpected decline in sales. Never once was it "I messed up." I have, on the other hand, seen boards pile all the blame onto the C-Suite. Seems easy enough to pile the blame on an AI.

I haven't been directly involved with any large company CEOs, but the CEOs of smaller companies I have worked with have frequently been constantly dealing with responsibilities from many decisions they took (or didn't block). Some have personality traits that hide the pool of concerns beneath the surface. And a couple were genuinely taking the life in tourist mode (oblivious to any and all concerns beyond the very next steps).

The "AI CEO" problem is not fundamentally different from self driving car responsibility problems. You need a big entity to be on the hook (financially and legally) if you are really going for lowered responsibility on the decision machinery. I think it can work though (but with a LOT of effort), and that might be an interesting startup idea (we provide 90% of the CEO work via AI, you be in control of the remaining 10%, and responsible for maybe 20% of it; our "insurance" covers the other 80% of the responsibility).

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: most human CEO's are doing trendslop as well. At least in the worlds I live in (US technology industry, so either megacap public companies or SV-funded startups). It often seems like all of the VCs, CEOs, and large investors in public software companies are all on the same group-chats and sharing the same ideas with each other, driving lots of this trendslop. From observation of having worked at 7-8 com…

Surprise, surprise: everyone thinks other people’s jobs are easier to automate away than their own.

> everyone thinks other people’s jobs are easier to automate away than their own.

You live in an ivory tower bubble if you truly believe this

Most people aren't even aware that anything even near this level of automation exists.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#677

Many comments are missing the point or just totally backwards. I have been both an IC eng and a founder / CTO (though me and my cofounder ran it more like co-CEOs). AI's will not be replacing CEOs (or other great execs) because being CEO (especially of a startup) is all about a few things, and all of those things are almost structurally what AI can not do. It's all about... * Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -…

Everything you described can be replaced by someone + AI. With a much better quality than replacing devs with someone + AI.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#678
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this hypothesis back in 2014 that all the communications from higher level managers could be replaced by a markov chain, because it was just variations on the same themes ("improve conditions", "make it easier to do....", " ". I never saw LLMs coming.

I have a friend who works a high-level management position, who told me that as long as results are delivered, management is doing their jobs 'by definition'. So if a manager is either horribly abusive or totally incompetent and his subordinates make up for it in some way, that the result is at least acceptable, nothing bad can happen to said manager, at least officially. Only failure is actionable, in which case sai…

"You don't work for a company; you work for a boss."

I didn't realize this until far too late.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out. These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.

Chinese humanoid robots are 3 years out from playing a decent round on a par 3 course.

Full self-drive and self-putt?

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#680

The best use of AI is to replace CEOs, C-Suite, politicians and bureaucrats. Let them feel the heat for the first time in their life. Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?

Most of them could already retire comfortably.

So the only potential heat is boredom.

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