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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

#331

Post by figers »

misano wrote: post #330
figers wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think we would see a large spike in unemployment if AI was reducing the number of employees needed for jobs the way these CEO talk about AI replacing people...

In a free market, there are many competitors, new startups, companies and teams may be created, but the general trend is that fewer people are needed to produce a product as productivity increases. A few years ago, a programmer would look for a front-end programmer and vice versa, but now it is not an obvious issue because they can almost work full stack for their small projects.

Yes I was referring to the scale of replacement these CEOs are talking about because of AI.

What you describe makes sense and has always been the case with new technology overall

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

#332

Post by zweifuss »

koe123 wrote: post #211
hintymad wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

I think taking Anthropic or any company in this space at face value is naive at best though. AGI has been 6 months away for years now. Surely anyone can think this through: Anthropic knows what theyre doing with their public facing repositories, they know to make things enabled by their tech seem impressive. I would consider Bun etc. examples of this. Realistically, nobody intellectually honest really knows.

The disagreement in timelines usually comes from differences in the used definition of AGI. Many who predict a 2026–2028 arrival define it as: 'the ability to perform any purely cognitive task a human can do.' If we stick strictly to that 'cognitive-only' metric, we are arguably very close.

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

#333

Post by jjk166 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #271
jjk166 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You say that as if "align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded" isn't one of the hardest, most fundamental problems in all of organization and management.

Because it isn't. Aligning incentives is really easy.

"If you do something that causes a productivity gain worth X, I will give you some reward with a value Y where Y is less than X but greater than the cost Z of the effort you needed to put in to generate the productivity gain. If the cost Z would be equal to or greater than X then don't do it."

Managers make their work immensely harder on themselves by unnecessarily adding the constraint that they can't get people to do things by paying them fair amounts to do them. Now certainly there are some highly skilled managers out there who can still succeed despite this handicap, and if that earns them a fat paycheck then good for them. But if you don't have those skills you don't get to excuse your failures with an inefficiency you created for yourself.

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

#336

Post by koliber »

Over the past 9 months I've been advising one small client of mine on AI adoption, and engineering maturity in general. They have a team of 5 engineers. One very capable lead and 4 ICs. They did not use AI at all before.

It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable.

One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade.

We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset.

One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs.

If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI.

In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.

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

#337

Post by firefax »

everdrive wrote: post #299
firefax wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What skills? I've met several. Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.

Quite frankly speaking and acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success. It might be fine to say that this is not a skill, but people can definitely tell and they select for it. I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it,…

>acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success

Define "upper crust"? Because I'm reading this as "old money", and a lot of the "old money" people I've met aren't actually generating much of it right now... they're just tending to investments purchases when the family horse glue factory or whatever got sold in the 1890s.

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