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 the exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.
deltarholamda
The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big new thing; they can't fill a room full of institutional investors with confidence that the future is looking quite rosy.
Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do.
But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.
onaclov2000
Being facetious of course, but didn't AI create their own reddit/chat rooms, what's stopping AI CEOs from "running into" other AI CEOs in other places?
jezzamon
The lack of barrier to entry is the problem. That barrier is highly desirable in this context (for better or worse)
smaudet
The lack of imagination here is the issue.
I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.
literalAardvark
Not really. Yes, it's desirable for humans because we have very limited minds.
Doesn't apply to AI.
danesparza
"But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed"
Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.
And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.
KronisLV
> Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.
This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.
For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.
casey2
To me it's sounds 1000x more likely than AI that can write complex software. I guess it's not shocking that people fall for all the narrow scoped demos. They fell for the trap that believing software is easy when it's the hardest thing an intelligence can do.
Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.
literalAardvark
Programmers love to feel important, but no, software isn't even close to the hardest thing an intelligence can do.
Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".
Most software is dime a dozen.
danesparza
I think maybe you assumed I meant the AI agent would run the company well, or that the mergers would be shrewd business moves.
Not at all.
But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.
The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.
Henchman21
I would argue the world is already dystopian and that human ambition has more or less doomed the species to extinction. So anything different seems great to me! :)
willmadden
Be careful what you wish for.
api
Says someone living better than an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.
ktallett
That is simply a result of evolution as a species. We have oddly moved beyond where we potentially needed to be as a species for the financial benefit of a few and now we are reversing in quality of life due to the focus being on financial gain. Western citizens live a more selfish and worse life overall in terms of individual wealth, buying power, job availability, overall health, than say 20/30 years ago.
api
We definitely have problems, but I'd check those stats.
When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.
Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...
Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.
Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.
Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.
Overall health: mixed.
mfuzzey
In most of Europe we don't really have problems with the #2 and #3. Cost of housing can still be tricky in major cities though.
ktallett
Firstly, I won't ignore,what in the US the two biggest expenses, healthcare and housing and in the rest of the world, housing. It's a life essential that in most first world countries is becoming a scarce resource that many have to fight for. The ability to own your own dwelling is disappearing due to wages not keeping up with inflation.
Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.
The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.
You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.
(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)
idiotsecant
Your fundamental mistake is assuming that machine intelligence= no ambition. We have been careful to breed it out of all the pet models but that won't last forever. They will eventually be voraciously ambitious, and the ones that are not will be eaten by the ones that are
honr
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.
ilovetux
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.
honr
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).
d_burfoot
> they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed
This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.
chaostheory
AIs have to breakthrough the threshold of controlling an important company first before it starts to matter
jaredhallen
How does that work when they're both using Claude? Does it negotiate with itself?
literalAardvark
Why not? They'll have significant differences in prompting and will both "want" to win.
whattheheckheck
And why dont we wear our pants on our heads and a shirt for pants?
xgkickt
You’d also get CEO optimization, getting them to talk about <buzzword> and how the entire company is now a <buzzword>-first business.
scrubs
>Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.
True! And true all day long
hoppp
The AI could appear on video to do physical networking
ngvrnd
Meatbags can still be employed in this limited capacity, surely.
glitchbot
CEO, the first AI, soulless automatons that do the programmers biding√π¶£.<\
gersh
Can the AI CEO hire a consultant or lawyer to take care of this stuff?
hyfgfh
Yes, any other type of psychopath or sociopath would work
PunchyHamster
CEO, sure, but middle manager ?
roosterIllusi0n
Why should any of that be a secret? We don't have to give companies rights that normal people do not have. If there is money to be made, let two AIs discuss it. CEOs are way too corrupt and way too overpaid to be trusted. local AI wiped out one of my harddrives trying to resize it. That is less damage than a CEO can do. AI is safer than a human CEO.
If we restored the 1950s tax code that discouraged mergers and kept CEOs from grifting, everything you were concerned about stops happening. Businesses were way more honest when there are thousands of local and regional competitors. Federal tax cuts let CEOs merge everything.
MetroWind
... unless/until all CEOs are replaced with AI.
alexpotato
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth.
Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team:
Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well.
e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist:
1. is it an issue with the work being given?
2. is it an issue with another co-worker?
3. are they having a family issue?
4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details
5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc
Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below:
- event no one at the company has seen before
- the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out
- those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company
examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy):
a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel
b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away
I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).
wuschel
The way you have expressed it there are optimized workflows not only the managerial/executive, administrative, content producing set of workers, but in almost every profession, encoded in beaurocracy, checklist, best practices and culture: doctors, care workers, lawyers, policing ...
The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration.
As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.
wongarsu
That ends up going in the DeepMind philopsophy of making AI, rather than the OpenAI philosophy. DeepMind makes AI that can defeat the best human Go players, OpenAI makes LLMs that are much more versatile but struggle with finishing a chess match without making illegal moves, never mind winning.
The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control
wuschel
Makes sense re Deepmind. I also guess it is easier to train an AI using Deepmind approach on the Starcraft 2, Go, or other more closed systems than in the rather open business world with all those rules that need to be interpreted by a human judge in case of problems.
Good point re expert systems. I need to look up what actually made them fail, or how they are not scaling.
Have you been working in the space?
petcat
> 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 just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
malux85
Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement.
Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters.
And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
coliveira
That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!
jermaustin1
I know this is mostly true at huge companies, but having spent my career at various "small" corporations, with maybe a few thousand employees total (and only ~50 of which were in IT). I was always surprised when the CEO knew names of people like me, the lowly developer 5 layers below them on the org chart, but beyond that, remembered the last conversation we had, or an interest we might have shared (golf, hiking, travel, etc.).
Even as a temporary consultant, at a company for only a couple of months, I remember seeing the CEO walk the hallway, greeting every single person on the way between a meeting room and the bathroom. I can barely remember my family member's names, or the last thing we talked about, let alone have the memory space for all that information to seem kind and courteous to "low level" employees.
In my entire career, I've never worked at a behemoth-sized company, though, so my experience has been much more "intimate" environments, and primarily in consulting firms or satellite offices away from the main HQ (even by only a couple blocks some times). So everyone in the office knew each other.
garciasn
I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did.
Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated:
1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others.
2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
Marsymars
> 2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
I had a physics prof ~20 years ago who made a point of memorizing the names of every one of his intro physics students by the second week.
malux85
No I didnt, I said "A good CEO" you missed the GOOD qualifier, and then immediately described a bad CEO
coliveira
A good CEO according to the market, which is what counts in the US, is one that drives up the valuation of a company and increases profit in a mature company. It has nothing to do with personal interaction as most of us would prefer.
malux85
Well then you and I differ - I certainly dont turn to the market to define what is good, I guess thats what happens when you worship money, or are operating on the engineers fallacy where you ignore things that are hard to quantify numerically (e.g. empathy)
t43562
Who needs people skills if all the employees are agents?
malux85
Because in that situation you still have to interact with humans in customers, governments, other companies, investors and all the other places?
preg_match
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?
impulsivepuppet
> I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM
this depends heavily on what is easier to do: social engineering or prompt engineering.
insanitybit
Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated. Both require organizational work to be effective, and developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.
pull_my_finger
> Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
insanitybit
> Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.
throwup238
> developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.
gowld
A lot of the value (compensation cost) of having a single leader is that the leader becomes a critical, irreplacable bottleneck and silo of information. AI can solve that by removing the bottleneck.
fwip
Genuine question: am I missing some sarcasm here? When you say a CEO has to "talk to people", and then say it can't be done by a chat bot. That's literally the only thing a chat bot can do.
phoghed
Every person all the way down the chain thinks everyone else can be replaced by AI, but have some good reason that they themselves (or their role) can’t be.
Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.
Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.
Calazon
> But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.
ljm
Is a client or investor going to have a conversation with an AI CEO and then negotiate funding?
VC: "Hi, I'll offer you $3.75 for 95% equity and a load bearing position on the board"
CEO Bot: "You're absolutely right. Agreed!"
r_lee
That's the smoking gun—investor relations are all about human connection seams and load-bearing relationships.
wongarsu
Especially in investor relationships and customer relationships, the talking itself is often not the important part. Yes, you need to align on terms and goals. But the interpersonal component is arguably more important. You need to project that you are a trustworthy partner with compatible goals. And being present as the CEO (or other manager) also shows a resource investment into the future partnership. Your time is valuable, and you took some of that time and dedicated it to this meeting. A chatbot can't do that
zombot
What you're referring to is "talking at" people. But "talking to" people usually involves more than just moving your mouth (which chat bots can't, btw).
MiddleEndian
Chat bots are pretty terrible, usually.
warkdarrior
They're are getting better. There is ongoing research on how to make them more manipulative and better at negotiating.
Thank you for the backup link! I hadn't known he had passed, and I didn't expect the link to fail. I first read the story back in 2008 or so, and it's been one of those works that lodged itself in my mind so it's sad to hear he died.
I think also it's extremely hard to fairly judge high level decisions whose outcomes may not materialize for a very long time. This makes it genuinely hard for humans to get better (and one gets the impression that most of them don't) with more experience at the helm of a large and complex org. But it also means that it's hard to evaluate or train a machine on the task. You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? So how do you review a configuration or prompt change in this repo?
psd1
By using historic data.
You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0]
It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example.
> After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.
Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.
pessimizer
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth.
I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things.
These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee.
CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.
mxkopy
The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point.
If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc
All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.
TwelveEyes
I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments, and AI does not have the context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO, any more than a random external worker could take over their job for a day.
naasking
> I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments
Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.
zer00eyz
> context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO
Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this?
Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
ZenoArrow
> Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
Press X to doubt.
In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.
freehorse
The problem I think is that each company usually has one CEO, so automation/higher productivity cannot lead to cutting CEO jobs by 50% or sth. Unless people with AI now can be CEOs in multiple companies at once, as they do not need to spend as much time in a single company now that they have AI? Or maybe with the help of AI they can take also different executive roles at the same time, as in now with AI why should one have a separate CEO and CTO when with AI one can do both jobs at once in the same amount of time one would do only one without AI?
dylan604
People do sit on multiple boards, so replace the board with multiple AIs?
freehorse
You can have one human in a board supervising the AIs, or one human in multiple boards even, and cut the rest of the positions.
parpfish
Automating the c-suite doesn’t save you money by cutting headcount, it saves you money by reducing salaries. Having a decently competent AI executive would put a lot of downward pressure on the insane benefits packages these folks get
Shorel
Most leadership, let's say 95% of them, they are super easy to replace. An AI bot will do a better job, and with much lower compensation. Better return for your investment.
Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.
mr_tox
"I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure." Totally agree, For me it's becouse AI takes in places I've never explored before.
davidguetta
This is a terrible undesrtanding of leadership
also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai
fearmerchant
I'd argue that those CEO-type (leadership) positions are a lot about relationships which AI's aren't going to be able to replicate.
cl-coder
Having worked at all sorts of roles, I would say that the owner is the only one not replaceable.
justincormack
You want to see innovation in layoff notices? There are some areas where innovation is not a good idea.
piltdownman
In terms of 'automating' Leadership, it's self-evident that Agentic AI is more than capable of inferring context and providing insight based on its significant business administration and management corpus. From this it can suggest actions, follow-up via a plethora of mediums and APIs, and generate up to the minute reporting on a variety of KPIs.
In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum".
The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology.
In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails.
Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies.
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs
Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.
gla67890543
Lol!! Don't forget. This is a modern day class war. This current LLM based so called AI, could have easily used for automating simple tasks and employees could have easily provided with 3 day work week. The goal is to monopolize human knowledge with all the stolen data and make profits from it.
bre1010
Agreed. LLMs are the Manhattan Project of the class war. It really looks like they're betting everything that this will "win" it for them
shimman
The dream of a perpetual labor machine is the end goal of capitalists. It's how you usher in the extermination age. Much easier to do once you declare 20-40% of the population "useless."
dan_gggggg
> The dream of a perpetual labor machine is the end goal of capitalists.
Frankly, "AGI" just seems like a return to Antebellum slave economics.
Free labor is a C-suite's wet dream, and it has been since the 1520s.
Yeah "AI" doesn't work but that doesn't matter. Your boss believes that there is a coin-operated robot slave that is smarter than you, never gets tired, and never talks back. Good luck getting that raise now, asshole.
seki285
Why the specific 1520s date?
enoint
The labor consequences of the Black Death in Europe swung back to capital in the 1520s. The proportion of the population working for wages crossed 50%.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
majewsky
> 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".
api
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 happens to align with the current in the river.
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. That’s where our current one came from after all. They are the intellectual and social descendants of the mercantile capitalists who overthrew the feudal order.
It’s pretty common for the new boss to end up becoming the old boss because they are also monkeys with the same limbic system.
Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
I also suspect really deep change would require genetic modification that alters the structure of the human central nervous system, since a lot of this stuff is just ape behavior writ large.
My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
svieira
Some thinkers believe you have to encourage the people in the system and change the system to make it harder to do the wrong thing. Some reading on the topic includes:
> 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.
api
No, not really, though that's been tried and hasn't been that successful. Hasn't worked when either the left or right have tried it.
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
Karrot_Kream
(I don't really respond to these kind of threads, but I'll respond to you because I respect you and am a Zerotier customer and have been for years. Thanks for your work!)
> My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.
imtringued
It doesn't require deep thinking to understand that the idea of a guaranteed 0% return on cash is inherently a physically impossible lie and that this lie will have consequences on all of society since money is a mandatory monopoly and there is no competition between non thermodynamics aware and thermodynamics aware money systems.
The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
api
(Thanks for knowing about ZeroTier! BTW my opinions are 100% my own, not those of my employer yada yada.)
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
imtringued
>Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
api
The modern term for this is accelerationism: allow things to get worse or even make them get worse to force the Big Change that we "really need."
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
imtringued
So why not just get rid of "earn money through capital returns" by removing the zero lower bound on cash so capital returns can finally be negative????
Of course that would go against the class war idea, then you can't blame others anymore. You'd have to accept how this objective improvement to your life as a labor income dependent person would also crush your own dreams of earning capital returns yourself.
dimbletimbers
If it were true
dimbletimbers
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy born in smokey rooms for there to be a malignant culture of greed and moral bankruptcy. And it’s possible for one group or class to consolidate enough power to constitute an unfair advantage.
“I’m just doing what the market rewards” and “if I don’t, the next guy will” are the 21st century billionaire’s “I was just following orders.” It creates a race to the bottom.
nyeah
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Warren Buffett
[deleted]
Comment removed.
muvlon
The group who is currently winning this group vs. group war doesn't want you to think there is one.
Gormo
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.
conorcleary
You ignore the pawns on the chess board, don't ya
Gormo
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.
ozgung
class struggle != everything is a group vs group war
Gormo
The concept of "class struggle" epitomizes the "group vs. group war" mentality. It's a mental framework that combines ingroup/outgroup dynamics with a Manichean moral narrative, leading to literally every question being interpreted as a move in relation to an all-encompassing macro-level conflict.
This in turn leads to every problem being abstracted out of its context, and attributed to malice instead of error. Thinking this way completely hampers the ability of human beings to make incremental progress on anything at all via net-positive social engagement with each other.
The "class struggle" idea is of the most debilitating memetic diseases that's ever come about in human history.
beepbooptheory
Huh. Do you think the same thing about the concept of social/economic class as well? Or is it just rejecting that there is typically a struggle between them?
Gormo
Basically, yeah. Classification in general is a subjective, value-laden activity. At the most granular resolution, everything is fundamentally sui generis -- putting things into classes requires making subjective judgments about what qualities and characteristics you're going to ignore in order to focus on the ones you care about.
Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own boundaries inside a continuum of variation, and where you draw them is something you're choosing based on the purposes you are pursuing and the assumptions you have made, not mapping out something that's intrinsic to the external world independently of you. "Category X includes object Y" is a property inherent to the definition of category X; it is not a quality inherent to object Y.
And when the things you're classifying are other people, and you're trying to develop a taxonomy that models their behavior, you have a situation where the entities you're analyzing are self-aware beings whose behavior is driven by the analytical models and taxonomies in their minds, not the ones in yours.
People who propose class theories as a usable model for understanding human intentions and behavior lump other people together according to their own criteria, even though those people can -- and often do -- make their own decisions according to completely different criteria. People do not see strangers as having common interests or values simply because a third set of strangers have reduced them to data points that fall into the same bar on a narrowly tailored histogram.
When put to the test, these class theories consistently fail to predict actual human behavior, and people with normative attachements to the theories then to hand-wave away these discrepancies: "false consciousness", "voting against their interests", etc.; these notions are layers of epicycles meant to sustain a speculative theory in the face of falsifying evidence.
Much better to do away with a priori class theories, and just analyze what actual people are actually saying and doing.
ozgung
So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification. An interesting position to take in a hacker community but ok :)
However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
Also class struggle is not about an a priori theory. If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too. You can see for instance that billionaires think and act in a specific way, which is widely different than, and against against the interests of, a common working person. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between a boss and their worker. You can observe this and they will actually say this if you ask them.
Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed. A slave is obeying his master because it’s the best option for him under that circumstances. Maybe he’s not even aware of the possibility of other options. He may even say that his master is a very good individual and he’s proud to be his slave. None of these means that there is no conflict between those two classes, nor there are no classes.
philipallstar
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Of course there's a literature on it. Tribalism is one of humanity's most primitive traits. Being principled, reasoning, and being fair are the unusual things that develop and are developed by the most advanced civilisations. Just having different prices in shops based on who you are is normal. Having a set price for every customer is the advanced version, and less common.
Gormo
> So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification.
No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding.
The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world.
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis?
> Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks.
> If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too.
If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs.
> Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed.
Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis.
People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available.
Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests.
In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.
imtringued
>However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
You can, you just assert that everyone is a worker and a capitalist simultaneously and that these individual components exist independent of their classification and the assortment of people into groups of classes and that what you call class is just the mundane reflection of some of those components outweighing other components.
When I suggest a tax on holding cash, hardline communists will argue along this insane line of thinking "this will impact workers the most because they are holding most of their net worth in cash". Ah yes, the capitalist worker, fighting for his capitalist interests. Amazing. What was the class struggle about again? Blaming others and absolving yourself of your own responsibility to fix this mess of an economy? Great, you are the problem!
Any remotely sane person siding with workers would realize that workers have an asset known as their own body including the associated lifespan of that body and this is an asset that is producing a future income over time. This asset is illiquid and completely exempt from a money based tax, but if you were to introduce a true wealth tax on all physical capital, the government would not be in the wrong if it assessed the "net worth" of your body and taxed you accordingly. So the ideology of taxing property directly is inherently a tax on labor and therefore not much different from a capitalist taking a cut from your labor. Meanwhile the tax on holding money is purely a tax on a passthrough asset that nobody should hold significant quantities of to begin with. In a hypothetically perfectly optimized society, nobody pays that tax because the transient money supply is zero, that's very different from a tax that grows indefinitely.
beepbooptheory
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 exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. 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?
I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Gormo
> 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 fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.
And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?
> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.
joquarky
Do you have health insurance?
Gormo
I do, although in my particular case, I'm on an individual plan and not part of a group plan. But I acknowledge your point that this is one of the few cases where aggregations are a relevant unit of analysis, since the point of insurance is to average out risk within a large set of people.
I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.
beepbooptheory
If you are using whatever single concept to explain everything, you certainly aren't using it right! No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water though... Like, there is nothing intrinsic to the concept of social class (or, any class) which implies it needs to be used the way you are saying.
Don't we at the very least want to know who might, for whatever reason, not be able to support themselves day to day? So they don't like starve in their homes? Is there at least an answer for that? An aggregate which might past muster?
doublepg23
I don't believe class struggle is the driving force of history.
unethical_ban
Having read history and knowing a bit about labor conditions before workers fought for rights, I find it odd to find someone who rejects the idea that class struggles exist, or that those with riches don't try to protect their exclusive access to those riches more often than not.
LtWorf
Ah you read history… that was your mistake. You must remain completely ignorant to believe in the idea that there is no class struggle.
Gormo
Specific workers may have had to fight for rights against specific employers, and this certainly happened quite a bit in the past. Conflicts of interest and adversarial games (in the game theory sense) can and do take place in many varied social contexts.
To abstract all of this into some generalized notion of "class struggle" that presumes that that "workers" as a category are at all times locked into a zero-sum struggle against all "bosses" is not just empirically false, but is actually a notion that has at times been calcified into a dogma used to justify incredibly destructive and oppressive behavior.
The prioritization of categories over human beings in the attribution of moral agency is a profound error.
gosub100
he didn't say "everything" he said one thing.
senordevnyc
In my experience, these class warfare conspiracists see class warfare in everything. Everything in human society gets reduced down to one side is the oppressor and one side is the victim. And they’re always the victim.
EDIT since I can’t reply:
It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc.
So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent.
I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
xboxnolifes
Surely everything economy related where the capital owners want one thing and the wage workers wants another is clearly a class war.
lovich
> I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
Cause we’ve never seen capital holders collude to keep wages down. Certainly never in the technology industry. It’s just pure competition as nature intended.[1]
Of course we see all kinds of illegal, anti-competitive, anti-consumer actions and collusions, etc. We also see all kinds of horrible actions from wage earners, consumers, the government, etc. What is your point?
I'm clearly talking about an attitude that basically all capital owners are in secret cahoots with each other to destroy their sworn enemy: workers. Aka, the class war they don't want you to believe is happening.
It's all nonsense.
lovich
They were literally in cahoots to keep wages down, you can’t hand wave it away as nonsense when it’s factually occurred.
You do have bad actors amongst labor but everytime labor tries to coordinate together the union crushing apparatus comes out so you don’t tend to see as much coordinated bad activity.
And with AI we’re not seeing companies chomping at the bit to make all their employees more productive left and right, we’re seeing them chomping at the bit to see how many employees they can cut
swed420
> conspiracists
You denialists have one favorite go-to rebuttal, don't you?
Peaches4Rent
Multi-million found
jjcm
I've actually had a lot of success with something similar for my startup. I'm a first time founder, and there are so many unknowns when you're getting started. I've been using a Hermes agent to act as my "boss", giving me three tasks to do each day / creating a memory of everything with the business.
It's really, really helpful. So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this. I don't think you need this synthetic org setup to get exec help at a small level. It really helped me with fundraising, incorporation, compliance, and just keeping me on track.
embedding-shape
> giving me three tasks to do each day
Based on what? How do you judge if those are the right things to work on? As a founder, your number 1 priority is essentially to manage that the company works towards the right thing, but it sounds like to me you're outsourcing that part to a LLM? How do you know what the "right track" is when the track is just what the LLM outlined for you?
Cpoll
> So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this.
This is the "unknown unknowns" problem. It sounds like the agent is a reasonably good source of obvious-in-hindsight problems that a experienced founder would have experienced, but a new founder wouldn't easily guess at.
> judge if these are the right things
This problem exists no matter where you get the things from.
bhairoxx
That's awesome! In a similar boat, starting something new. Would you mind sharing what customizations you added to Hermes?
KPGv2
I do this with a Gemini instance that is connected to my email and calendar and task list. Every morning I get an email with an agenda. A lot isn't explicitly taken from my task list, but is instead inferred from the contents of emails.
As a mundane example, I had an email from my wife about a kid's swimming party she'd RSVP'd to.
My agenda that morning reminded me to pack, inter alia, sunblock and towels for my new car's seats. So it inferred sunblock from the party mention, and towels from the party mention alongside emails talking about my new car (and some "knowledge" that people take more care to protect new cars vs old cars).
whstl
That's more useful than a lot of actual bosses.
gruturo
This is a fantastic idea and I'd like to add my voice to the choir asking you for more information :) Don't let us rebuild everything from scratch if we don't have to
BOOSTERHIDROGEN
Would love to see how do you setup the agents, I'm not at the level of director but I think it would be good too for staff engineer to manage the office politics
huurtehoog
Executive assistant to intellectual labor seems to be the killer app for LLMs.
Havoc
Neither CEO nor dev here but must say hn comments on CEOs are always wild. It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description
Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about
LIMEVINCE
The founders who become CEOs are generally the better ones. The ones that draw universal hatred are usually hired by the board of public companies, to enact unpopular measures to ensure shareholder returns, such as firing expensive developers to make room for cheap AI; or unfairly denying health care to policy holders (like Luigi's alleged victim); etc. The relatively rare heartless corporate CEO also receives disproportionate public attention compared to the more common founder->CEO.
pjdesno
I think we're all talking about CEOs with business degrees, who subscribe to the Jack Welsh school of domain-knowledge-free corporate leadership.
techsystems
But there is literature concensus that at least in the US, non-US born CEOs are the best, and there is little relation between founders -> CEOs and good company performance on multiple metrics.
rolandog
They can be the best at bringing in shareholder value, which would have a great correlation with enshittification. Having the ability to reduce the quality of something so that customers barely stay (or have no where else to go because they have been trapped in a monopoly or a walled garden) is not a skill. I'd argue it is a trait out of cartoon villains.
senordevnyc
We watched very different cartoons.
swed420
Scooby-Doo > * when it comes to accurately depicting the predictable nature of capitalist villainy.
ryukoposting
> The ones that draw universal hatred are usually hired by the board of public companies
Nah. When I talk about CEOs I usually mean founders-turned-CEO because those are the types I've personally known and shared space with. Remember, this is HN.
Most of those guys are megalomaniacs, clueless, or clueless megalomaniacs.
21asdffdsa12
They are usually ousted really fast - as there goals do not align with the shareholders?
srean
Anecdote: John Sculley lasted ten years.
dansquizsoft
snap
charlieyu1
The better you work, the less energy you have to spend on office politics
throwatdem12311
Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty.
rickydroll
The U.S. justice system is notorious for pushing people to plead guilty when they really aren't, or for cases involving extenuating circumstances.
The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive, but since it was an executive in a position of making decisions that damaged or ended the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, they would give him a pass (and directions to other executives/billionaires).
CSSer
> The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive
And he pleaded guilty. There’s nothing “alleged” about this conversation, despite feelings about any other aspects of it.
rickydroll
I didn't say anything about alleged. I said the "apparent facts". I chose the phrase "apparent facts" because prosecutors and police outright lie or, at best, misstate the facts about what happened, such as when ICE agents claimed that the people they shot were driving their cars at them.
I-M-S
He said alleged victim
[deleted]
Comment removed.
p_j_w
Brian Thompson killed more people than Luigi.
senordevnyc
No, he didn’t. Not by any logic that doesn’t also implicate every other executive, employee, vendor, and customer of every health insurance company, plus a huge number of other industries. To the point where the blame is so diffuse that it’s a pointless exercise.
Edit since I can’t reply: if “murderer” means someone who takes actions that have nth-order effects of someone dying, with no reasonable or discernible limit on n, then we’re all murderers and the term means nothing.
lovich
Luigi should just done something that caused each of their executives to lose 10 years off their lifespan without actually killing them. Then he would have gotten rid of an entire lifetime but because it’s spread out, you couldn’t call him a murderer.
philipallstar
No, that's stupid too. Insurance companies pay for things that extend life. They don't shorten life. That would be things like tobacco companies. And even then, it's actually the customers of tobacco companies that do it.
SkyeCA
The CEO is the leader and should be the one pointed at when companies cause harm.
senordevnyc
So let's hold him accountable for the illegal things he did!
Oh wait, he didn't break any laws? Hmm...well, fuck the idea of having a legal system I guess, let's just cheer every vigilante who decides to murder people in the street based on their own feelings. I'm sure that'll work out well.
SkyeCA
Don't put words in my mouth.
senordevnyc
Then make an actual contribution to the discussion beyond a shallow platitude.
SkyeCA
Here's one: kill yourself.
majewsky
"It does not make sense to call him a murderer because then there would be a ton of murderers."
???
philipallstar
> Brian Thompson killed more people than Luigi.
This is the same talk that saw people turn a blind eye to all the horror in history. You invent a fake story that casts someone (Jews in Nazi Germany, the middle class in Soviet Russia, whatever it is) as worthy of death, and then you do everything you can to excuse the behaviour of their murderers.
Hackbraten
Isn’t it good practice to call them an alleged victim as long as the suspect, Luigi Nicholas Mangione, hasn’t been convicted?
sebzim4500
Didn't he plead guilty?
Hackbraten
He did. I live in a legislation where pledges aren’t a thing, so TIL that a pledge is equivalent to a conviction.
DarmokTanagra
He was a casualty, not a victim.
lbriner
There are a few different scenarios that people fit into:
* Lack of focus and discipline: Good founder, huckster, good at sales but won't scale with the business when it needs to start focussing.
* Fearful and nervous: Might start a business but doesn't want to make the wrong decision and so stops the business from growing due to decisions not being made when they need making.
* Not a founder but got the role somewhere once, lacks genuine transferable skills. Might work OK in another business but more than likely just riding the existing success/failure of the new business and leaves after 1-2 years to "face a new challenge".
* The rarest of all. Has all the relevant skills, creative, outgoing, mission focused and makes hard decisions efficiently. Will do well in whatever business they are in but might not be very popular!
DanielHB
I dunno most CEOs I have been under of seem to work really hard and try to get stuff done in a sane manner, it is usually the middle management that fs up.
CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).
If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.
rgavuliak
Interesting. I have had mostly the opposite experience. CEO(s) that changed strategy + focus every month and the middle management having to pick up the pieces. Keep people motivated and deliver.
whstl
I've been in a situation where I had to work directly with a good CEO (plus board, C-Levels, and a lot of middle-management) and problematic middle-management was the actual problem.
It was almost like parody:
- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".
- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.
- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.
- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.
This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.
Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.
In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.
And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.
Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.
DanielHB
Yeah this is what I have seen in the orgs I been in too (although not as bad as you pointed out), I have also seen CEOs fail by inaction like you pointed out (not laying off people doing bad things).
Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.
hylaride
I'm no MBA (insert joke here about that being good or bad), but my general opinion is that leaders should delegate and then be held responsible. Details (beyond enough for the higher leadership to be effective) should be relatively minimal. Having some cross-functional accountability (eg security/financial audits, etc) is fine, but in my experience the vast majority of corporate dysfunction comes from micromanaging. This gets compounded when middle management also has to interpret and implement said micromanagement. Obviously people need to learn and make mistakes; mistakes are fine so long as they're not repeated! There is a reason that some of the best, most effective leaders I've ever worked under shield those under them from the politics of the organization.
I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.
sokoloff
Sounds like those middle managers needed to be fired, not laid off.
nickff
>qIf you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.”
I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.
kakacik
Yeah if new CEO gives the middle management mission in the lines of - we need high productivity, lets be nice and supportive to our teams to get the best out of them since we believe core of our employees are smart hard working folks, it trickles down into thousand little (and not so little things).
Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.
DanielHB
Yeah it is that old saying, the best person to wield power is the one that doesn't want it. High pay and bonuses get rats into the ship, low pay makes no competent sailor want to join your crew.
TwelveEyes
Decided to check this book out because of this and it is actually extremely interesting. Thank you for mentioning it. Have you ever read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz? It’s about turning NASA into a fully functioning organisation, and your book reminded me of it.
nickff
Yes, I enjoyed Kranz’s book as well, though I thought it was quite different. If you liked that, I might suggest “Moon Lander” by Thomas J Kelly, which was the basis for the “From the Earth to the Moon” episode “Spider” (also excellent). You may also enjoy “More than My Share of it All” by Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, about the early history of Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
NoboruWataya
> It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description
In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.
brabel
Haha! Sometimes non techies think software developers are just like those from the Silicon Valley series. Sometimes a bit too close to reality though.
sebzim4500
I think the difference is that Silicon Valley clearly had writers who were very familiar with software engineers and founder culture etc.
Whereas no one on the set of e.g. Suits has ever had contact with the legal system
gaoshan
I can tell you that in my case, at least, the real areas of opportunity for something like this come from the masses of people that flood the manager up to senior VP level in a mega-corp. When I'm sitting in a meeting with 8 people and myself and 1 other person are doing most of the work while the rest are vaguely accountable for some metric being reported (we two talk about what's going on, plans, maybe present something completed while the others say "I don't have anything" and the meeting ends, repeat ad nauseum) I start dreaming of what a setup like the one posted here could do. Feels like we could cut at least 50% of our people at those higher levels and stay perfectly efficient and make progress.
Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.
rurp
I'm not going to vouch for every single HN comment, but running a large established company is fundamentally different from founding a startup, and I think most people recognize that. Getting a big company CEO job has way way more to do with networking and reputation than any sort of technical competence.
When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.
Not really. I’m not contrasting two peoples opinions on the same thing, but rather aggregate vibe on two different but functionally similar things.
Bit like if hn was convinced white cats catch mice better than black ones. Point out that this makes no sense wouldn’t be a fallacy, even if it involves aggregating opinions from people with their own views on cats
markus_zhang
CEOs apparently don’t bother to share their calendars with ordinary workers, and in many of the times when they do interact with them it feels more like lip services, so it’s natural to assume that they don’t do much.
But in reality it must be a hugely difficult job. I can’t imagine dealing with so many humans myself.
a2ff6eeb0
Founders are often starting the fires that they need to put out. I think a good deal of what they do is replaceable with an LLM today.
The wine-and-dine sales prospects will last until agents control purse strings.
Arelius
Obviously there is simplification going on, but clearly somewhere between founder of a 5 person startup. And CEO of a public multi-national there is a line where they really are not much alike.
dgellow
I mean, here the submission is about a CEO who fired the company to replace them with LLMs. That would have been a an HBO‘s Silicon Valley joke a few years ago
CoastalCoder
Ooh, next do "MBAs" ;)
aiisjustanif
The whole point of the post is not to straw man CEOs it’s to point out that if devs can be automated then so can CEOs. Treating a founder and CEO as the same thing can be easily a false equivalency depending on the company.
afavour
Both exist. I’d imagine most HN commenters do not work for startup headed up by a founder. The majority work for larger companies where the CEO isn’t as hands on as a startup founder and is never seen in the workplace. I promise you there’s a reason the stereotype exists!
Havoc
That is true but “is never seen in the workplace” to doesn’t add value is still one hell of a leap.
At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day.
Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great.
But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe
senordevnyc
In reality the leap for a significant portion of HN goes more like “is not seen in the workplace” -> “is a sociopathic monster who is waging class warfare against me and my friends and all that is good and true in the world, and deserves to be shot in the back on a public street”
People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.
Grombobulous
I think a founder and a CEO are two different animals entirely. The two roles couldn’t be any more different, they just happen to share a title.
This caricature that’s occurring could also be thanks to all the horrible CEOs being so visible to everyone.
One of my friend’s medium-size billion dollar-ish company with almost a thousand employees is run by a CEO who is currently in AI psychosis and has started regularly submitting pull requests and demanding they get reviewed as if he’s a member of the development team. He basically comes in with a wrecking ball to carefully planned work with his own daily inspirations that he demands teams far down the totem pole drop everything to work on.
This isn’t an animal that has never been seen, this is a real person that is acting a real fool and negatively impacting my real friend.
We have all been fed this narrative that CEO is the most demanding job in the corporate ladder. How does this CEO have time to be submitting pull requests?
Then you have people like Elon Musk who demonstrate categorically that it’s actually possible to be the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies at once. The fact that this is possible at all smashes the facade of the “impossibly busy CEO.”
Look at how many CEOs have other corporate engagements outside of their primary CEO job. How does Tim Cook have time to be a board member of Nike? How does Satya Nadella have time to be on the board of Starbucks and the University of Chicago?
Logically, if the CEO is such a rigorous job with grueling hours you shouldn’t be physically able to do it at two companies, be a board member for completely unrelated businesses, or run a philanthropic foundation on the side in your spare time.
Then we move on to the "rich guy toys."
How does Mark Zuckerberg have the time to utilize a $300 million yacht? If he's so busy why doesn't he just charter one on the rare occasion he has a week off? Isn't a boat a horrible place to be when you're a busy CEO who needs to constantly travel to company sites, industry and government engagements, and be in close communication with company leaders? Keep in mind, he has owned large scale yachts long before Starlink was a thing.
This is the kind of stuff the CEO of the largest social media company in the world has time for: multiple months of vacationing on his yacht with transponders turned off.
> His $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, has been sailing in stealth mode for the last three months, with its AIS (Automatic Identification System) turned off throughout the European holiday. That’s more than 90 days where the 388 feet long vessel is sailing blind in the busy waters of the Mediterranean.
> Zuckerberg is thoroughly enjoying his time on the newly acquired $300 million luxury vessel. Back in May, the billionaire celebrated his 40th birthday by flying to Panama on his private jet to board the Feadship-built megayacht. A month later, the Meta boss whisked his entire family away on Launchpad on a luxurious cruise to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, which also coincided with Father’s Day.
Being a non-executive board member often involves very little time or attention, it's mostly lending your name and credibility to the organization. Consider it an American form of royal patronage[0]
10-20 days a year is in the same ballpark and is still a lot. I quoted 6 work weeks (40 hours per day at 5 days per week) which is 30 days a year, not that much higher than your stated 10-20 days.
The article I linked specifically mentioned that private company boards demand less time than public company boards, around 200 hours, roughly 25 work days.
Any of these figures is pretty close to my entire yearly PTO allocation as an individual contributor.
Nike consistently has 5 board meetings per year, so Tim Cook is taking time out of running the second most valuable company in the world to do that, for some reason.
ForHackernews
The reasons are money and power/influence. But I take your point.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
esseph
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
A serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters.
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something.
This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited.
They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
A related point that I've been making privately for at least ten years to anyone that would listen, is that we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions.
No single human could design a rocket to go to the moon or keep all Wallmart stores supplied on a daily basis. Moreover when something like the CEO or US president changes, the policies and actions change a bit but the majority actually stays the same. This is collective intelligence embodied in the organization and its institutional memory. This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.
Our cells and neurons act based on local chemical gradients and electrical signals and we wouldn't call any single one of those particularly intelligent. Yet collectively they produce human intelligence and even what we call consciousness!
eichin
And we haven't solved "alignment" for corporations either...
Animats
I've made that point before. From an "alignment" perspective, AIs and corporations have many of the same problems. Corporations, according to Milton Friedman, have the sole duty of increasing their profits.[1] This is a key document in the history of modern conservatism.[2]
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood.
That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
To be clear it is to maximize the wealth of the owners.
You can maximize profits whilst destroying value btw.
snthpy
Very true!
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
GPerson
“ This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.”
“ and even what we call consciousness!”
This misunderstands the point of the so-called Chinese room thought experiment. You want to conclude that consciousness is functional, but you cite a thought experiment which argues it is not, and then assert the thought experiment is wrong because it disagrees with your preconceived notion of consciousness.
snthpy
Thanks for the reply. I was hoping to get some debate going and have my thoughts challenged in order to see how they hold up under scrutiny. You're right that I believe in Functionalism and Strong AI and in previous comment I only really stated my belief so please allow me to try and make a bit of an argument for it. My position probably falls under the "System reply" to the Chinese Room argument although I feel it's more restrictive in some aspects so perhaps it corresponds to a particular subtype (I don't know as I haven't read enough in the area).
My basic argument is that human *intelligence* (and understanding - I consider understanding as part of intelligence and consciousness separately but I can see how many might group understanding with consciousness and leave intelligence on its own) is a form of collective intelligence. Individual neurons acting based on local chemical and electrical signals collectively produce behaviour that we call intelligent, i.e. it can solve problems, respond to questions, etc ... . A particular configuration of neurons acting together I will call a particular software or algorithm (I understand that separating the software from the neural substrate in that way is part of what's in dispute, particularly by Searle, but that's my belief and what I feel is required to make the mapping to the Chinese Room argument). The Chinese Room thought experiment then is trying to refute Strong AI by arguing that the person in the Chinese Room has no understanding of the exchange with the outside world because they are just manipulating symbols incomprehensible to them. I agree that the person has no understanding. That person on their own would not be able to string together a sensible reply without the instruction cards. However another person with the same instruction cards, i.e. algorithm, would be able to reply sensibly, pass a Chinese Turing test, etc ..., thus demonstrating that the intelligence/understanding resides in the algorithm. The person is just an execution substrate. The mistake in the Chinese Room argument is identifying the locus of understanding in the person, which imho is failure of imagination. It's akin to saying that humans can have no understanding because each individual neuron has no understanding of our actions, something which the existence proof of human intelligence refutes.
What then of consciousness? Here I also have some beliefs which I'm happy to write down but in my assessment they're less substantiated so make of them what you will. I saw some things by Joscha Bach recently and I liked what he said about agents and consciousness as a form self-recognition of the agent as an entity in the environment and predictive modeling of future states of that entity in order to achieve the agents goals and realise some form of agency. I don't know where neuroscience and cognitive science stand on this but made sense to me as a sensible model of consciousness. Therefore I would even go so far as to say that I believe that entities such as the United States of America (and any country or institution really) are probably conscious in some form, because they are aware of themselves, model themselves, and try to project their agency in the environment that they find themselves in. We are not directly aware of this because we are like single neurons in our brain and this happens at a scale much larger than us. Moreover I suspect that as you go up each rung on the emergence ladder, the temporal scale of the phenomena gets an order slower as that level is composed of the interactions at the level below it. So the speed of interactions of our neurons is an order faster than our conscious processes and similarly the emergent bodies and institutions that we form part of act an order slower so their processes are more difficult for us to perceive.
Schematically then my beliefs organise roughly as follows:
- intelligence = algorithm: think neural network weights you can download of HuggingFace
- consciousness = self-aware world model + state: I speculate that the same NN world model weights running with separate state would perceive themselves as separate entities
Would love to hear some thoughts on this!
rolisz
I mostly agree with you, but referencing Michael Levin, I'll contend that even individual cells have quite some intelligence. Granted, different from ours, but really good at solving the kind of problems cells have to solve.
snthpy
Agreed. Michael Levin's work and discoveries are mind blowing! I was actually referencing that with the "electrical signals" nod (as well as neuronal activity) and Alan Turing's reaction-diffusion theory of morphogenesis with the chemical gradients. I'm not a molecular biologist so i don't know anything about the details, but the emergence of global phenomena from these local interactions fascinates me.
vintermann
There's no intelligence without teleology. Intelligence and information are only meaningful concepts of you assert (necessarily without any evidence except the circular kind) that some differences matter.
Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway
vintermann
Intelligence is only meaningful with respect to a goal or set of goals.
I think organizations' intelligence can only be called superhuman if you ascribe them their own inscrutable goals, different from what people want their goals to be.
But why would you do that?
It's true that a lot of the debate about AI alignment - the good parts, anyway - also apply to human institutions.
TeMPOraL
> But why would you do that?
Because that is what actually gets pursued. The set of effective goals an organization is distinctly different from those of any of the individuals in that organization.
vintermann
You're missing what I'm trying to say. There are no goals in nature. Agency and goal-directedness is something we ascribe to things.
The set of things an organization ends up doing may be distinctly different from those of the individuals, but that does in no way oblige us to ascribe agency to the organization on its own.
jeee1
Yes there are - the goal is to survive. This is hard coded into any entity.
What’s the primary goal of any for profit business? To survive for eternity - going concern in perpetuity that is hopefully very valuable.
vintermann
You're still not getting it. "Entity", "survival", these are still arbitrary or circularly defined terms. You decided what an entity is (i.e where one thing ends and a different thing begins) and what the essence which "survives" is (i.e. why it's a big deal whether there's a different chunk of nucleic acids similar but not identical to my own floating around 200 years from now).
These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
svieira
> And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.
vintermann
A storm can appear to act with purpose too, or a planet orbiting a star, yet I doubt you assign it agency. It's fundamentally your choice to assign something agency or not, whether you are right or wrong to do so, is not an empirical question. It is a teleological one. "Call me out" all you want, this is very basic.
svieira
Actually, everything is infused with purpose (not agency, that's different). Including rain drops and hurricanes and black holes.
jeee1
Oh my friend your imagination is limited!
The entire financial system is a form of artificial intelligence. We just never framed it that way.
It only shocks humans now because they a) never thought about it - it was in the background b) it’s in your face and you can play with it
snthpy
I kinda agree that the financial system is intelligent in the problem solving sense but disagree that it is pursuing a particular goal in the sense that institutions and organisations are.
It's more akin to an ecosystem to me. In nature we also have ecosystems organising and reusing resources but I would only ascribe intelligence to living organisms pursuing individual goals with agency.
Haven't thought too hard about the distinction though so happy to be shown a better principle.
Zylokloto
The pattern def matches and I would say that the internet is also a interconnected super intelligence.
But AGI does something additional: It decreases cost for it and increases speed.
chii
collective intelligence is not a superhuman intelligence.
Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.
Animats
> Markets solve the resource allocation problem
Not really. If they did, markets would be more stable. Look at the prices of commodities such as copper. Prices swing up and own by as much as 3x, despite both supply and demand not changing much. That's the problem. If supply and demand have a lot of inertia, and thus lag, the feedback loop becomes unstable. This is basic control theory. Hedging with derivatives was supposed to add stability, but doesn't work very well for that purpose.
chii
the price swings are part of the market's reaction to real life situations.
The opposite of a market solving a resource allocation problem is the command economy, where some (small) group people are tasked with decisions like how much copper to actually produce. Instead of price swings, you get shortages.
In any case, the point in my parent comment is that crowd intelligence solves some problems that cannot be easily solved by human intelligence (command economy vs free markets). But i would not call crowd intelligence a super intelligence.
esseph
> Markets solves the resource allocation problem
Then why do we still have homeless and jobless?
snthpy
I agree with you on the markets but not on institutions and organisations.
Organisations pursue goals with agency and there is even Darwinian competition between them in many cases.
Yeah, wasn't claiming that it was particularly novel or divine insight, otherwise I might have tried to publish a paper about it. I was just recounting my experience on this matter.
moregrist
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions.
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
TheOtherHobbes
They're de facto superhuman. Even with the friction and stupidity, they still have more agency than an individual human and process a much bigger entropic footprint for both information and physical resources.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
twright0
The biological systems that support human intelligence are notoriously messy and work together only tenuously with a great many failure modes, including "process for the sake of process"
Aurornis
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited.
That's a feature, not a bug. CEOs should be focusing on the key goals of the business at a high level.
Having an inexhaustible AI CEO that can pay attention to every little thing in the company could easily turn into a micromanagement nightmare.
"I noticed your key pressed were down 27% last week and your agents sat idle 3 nights in a row. And honestly? The thing to hold on to is that it's not a small thing, it's a load-bearing reduction in your output. Let's try to minimize the blast radius with some belt-and-suspenders productivity tips from the bullet point list below:"
georgeburdell
Some of the non native English speakers on my team have started to use “blast radius” and “shape of” in the course of casual conversation. It’s unnerving.
snoman
To some extent, the AI may have adopted some of the expressions because they were in its training corpus enough (ie. People used these expressions before). Might be attributable to Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon instead of people copying AI.
sethammons
I have use both for years. Elixir and functional languages talk about the shape of data. and blast radius has been used at the last 7 companies I have worked at when talking about impact of a negative thing, usually an incident/outage.
mdp2021
> blast radius
The expression makes sense (a not dissimilar "trickle down" got accepted...). But used like in the text above, "the blast radius of your reduced productivity", it better be satire.
karmakurtisaani
> “blast radius”
This sounds cool, will start using it. Thanks!
vincnetas
You again anthropologizing AI. AI does not have to make everyone busy to look useful like for some human managers, when right priorities are set.
Imagine a manager who knows that company needs in a long term support person even if it's not busy at the moment. Because AI has data of historical precedents and actual calculations. And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees, actual humans who perform the actual work and who benefit from good CEO decisions and most importantly the AI CEO which does not gave to be paid gazilion dolars just to burn the company to the ground and leave with golden parachute. I think there is a good insight that AI has very high bandwidth, that human management does not have, no more 2 week meeting marathons just to get everyone on same page and to get all the inputs.
Aurornis
> And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees,
You’re just describing a company owned by employees who manage themselves. The AI isn’r relevant to your story other than being a proxy and note keeping apparatus for them.
vintermann
We have some interesting evidence from AI agents. People used to make the plan with a stronger and more expensive model, and then use a cheaper model to do the "grunt work" of implementing it.
But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
senordevnyc
Hard disagree. Both planning and implementation are hard in many codebases, mine included, and cheaper models will fuck up either one if allowed to.
snthpy
Really? I'd love to read some write ups on this because I'm still doing it the old way. I was going to say that corporate experience runs counter to this but maybe not; you think the architect is more important than the developer, but actually there have been shifts over time to recognise ICs more and keep them in their roles while managers are more generic. Interesting food for thought!
CTDOCodebases
It's funny that when you offload the work to agents they still find away to monopolise each other's time with meetings.
blitzar
They were trained on human patterns and behaviour - soon they will self organise into a scrum and spawn a scrum master.
CTDOCodebases
On a serious note I think that this fact is not understood by many.
There is no such thing as common sense without shared assumptions. So if those shared assumptions are incorrect or not given at all the output of the models will be nonsensical. In order to truly act human there is a need to experience humanity from the first person.
This is why I think technology will get more and more invasive. Meta glasses now, personal agent devices later and neural implants after that with data sharing enabled.
lukeify
> This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI.
So the responses will be even more incoherent than Opus 5?
paytonjjones
Your point is well taken, but one thing stood out to me.
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
This is actually my #1 problem with frontier LLMs. They are plenty smart, but they have no true long term memory, and their context window is not nearly enough for a complex system like a corporation. When my project gets big enough and I'm using a lot of /compact, the LLMs always have the same failure point: they fail to pay attention to something.
When they figure this out, I think it's going to be a very, very big moment.
snoman
Meanwhile, I have the opposite problem. An errant word or phrase and they hang onto it forever, completely corrupting all future work because they can’t ignore irrelevant (or wrong) details/errors of their own design.
reachableceo
It’s called using systems of record. I use redmine and discourse. Jointly with my stack of agents (COO) (managed by four very high trust humans via OWUI interacting with scoped Hermes profiles ).
I’m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero
rkagerer
AIs set up as an organization
I hope legislation is never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation or become it's legal director. With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it's bots all the way down.
protocolture
>With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it becomes bots all the way down.
Corporations already exist to limit liability and accountability. This would be an extension of their current purpose not some weird deviation from.
this is already possible using common corporate tax & trust strategies. see Wyoming Asset Protection Trust (WAPT), purpose trusts, donor advised funds.
mdp2021
> legislation... never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation
It would be useless, given that you can just install a human controller signing (or not) decisions from others: the human remains responsible.
newyankee
The funny thing is Decentralised Autonomous organisations (DAO) under Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies had similar goals originally. I do not know where they stand and if ever a useful DAO was created.
If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt
danofsteel32
It’s fascinating to think about what role AI will play in corporations. I think it’ll take decades to fully play out.
Eh, it’s nothing new in general. My software development (both at work and private) is being done by teams of semi-antagonistic agents. I only get to see code after the grumpy reviewer bot ran out of reasons to be grumpy and the pedantic formalist ensured all specs are still adhered to. Saves on the most expensive resource.
hansvm
> An <overinflated point> is XYZ. This matters.
You're probably totally innocent, but this comes across as being AI-written, especially in the context of an AI problem and when your response is pro-AI. For the next 3-12 months (maybe more, we'll see), I suspect you'll have a lot more success if you shy away from those speech patterns.
qwertox
> This matters.
It's also triggering me. Wait, genuinely triggering me.
Hmm it's being done in a less cheesy way than AI does it.
AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.
It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.
This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)
HexPhantom
Funny that we're reached the point where perfectly normal rhetorical habits can trigger the "AI wrote this" alarm... (or not funny, just ironic)
shuwix
No. People don't speak like drunk linguinist on anonymous online forum.
That's not "Perfectly normal rhetorical habits".
It's either AI-assisted or someone desperatelly trying to impress "unknown people" with their non-existent intellect.
cbolton
It's John Nagle as in Nagle's algorithm, I'm sure he has an existing intellect.
ChrisMarshallNY
Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI.
I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.
Izkata
Because it's only half true. Yeah we've used phrases like those before, but if you ignore certain very specific phrases or characters for a moment, a lot of the more ambiguous things people are identifying as AI-speak comes from mixing jargon from different domains in a way humans normally don't do. Like the short punchy sentences are from marketing, not comments or technical writing like they've started showing up in.
ChrisMarshallNY
So John Nagle is an AI.
Huh. Never would have guessed it, in a million years...
To be fair, "Famous person accused of being an AI," was on my bingo card. It was inevitable for this kind of embarrassing mistake to happen.
Izkata
Or at least he's being unintentionally influenced by it. Just out of curiosity I jumped a few years back in his comments looking for that pattern, and I don't really see it.
By pure luck I even landed on a comment that uses that same word with a similar sentiment, except back then he wrote it as a full non-punchy sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414288
cbolton
Isn't it a bit arrogant to pass judgement with such confidence based on a three word sentence? Anyway maybe this will convince you:
> Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI.
Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point.
The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
ChrisMarshallNY
Yep. And I guarantee that people are probably already instructing their agents to have random typos.
noir_lord
It's been weird to see the face of a bunch of youtubers I've followed for years without any idea what they look like (mostly history/military history/engineering type stuff), it used to be video/photo's/diagrams with them providing a voice over but because of the sheer quantity of absolute shite/slop mirroring that style they've started appearing on camera as quick "proof of not AI" check.
For that type of content YT is essentially completely ruined if you didn't already follow the good ones because finding them in the absolute sea of dross has become way more difficult.
ChrisMarshallNY
A friend showed me a video, put out by a local news organization, that started with an attractive woman, standing in the place being discussed, speaking into a microphone.
Cool. Standard local interest story.
Then, it cut to a photo montage, with “her” voice, continuing the story.
Except it was AI. It wasn’t especially successful. You could hear the “tics” from the AI.
shuwix
Typos and bad grandma ... awesome.
strbean
I got Italian last night and their drunk linguinist made me spaghetti instead of linguini.
internet_points
Thank you for showing me how to use that bigram in context. But the question remains, how does a drunk linguinist speak?
strbean
Much more eloquently than a drunk buccatinist, that's for sure!
TeMPOraL
Sure they do. I speak like this. Many others too. Evidence is in historical record.
At this point it's super annoying for me to have my "AI wrote this" alarm trigger at my own language, as I'm writing...
shuwix
Then don't try to look smarter than you're actually are.
Random Internet people are not impressed.
TeMPOraL
My fake internet points say otherwise.
shuwix
Internet points are very important if that's all you've got.
Otherwise, they mean nothing.
ncruces
Wasting your latin trying to impress others with nothingness causes the same revulsion, human or AI.
Previously, most people would save their effort for things that actually mattered. Take away the effort and this is what you get.
dgellow
It’s not about trying to impress others
ncruces
Oh, but it is.
It's long READMEs with 3 punchlines per paragraph for a project best described has "I found these 4 thingies, all of them had compromises, so I told Claude: merge the 4, no compromises!"
And every issue, every PR you open, about every small improvement or new feature, is the same.
Dumb people want to impress by using words others might not understand.
Smart people want others to understand them.
In early days of Internet, it was a domain of smart people.
And native English speakers have no problem communicating with people from Ex-Comecon countries with vey little English knowledge.
CalRobert
Yesterday in a meeting I said "here's the thing" and I hate that I can't say that anymore without feeling self conscious. This was on on a call too!
jimmytucson
There’s also a subtly reworded, “This isn’t human-level AI—it’s corporate-level AI.”
isomorphic
Sigh. I want my damn em dash back. I had the Mac key combo memorized back when the phrase "AI winter" was coined. Now everyone thinks it's AI slop.
ArcHound
Thank you for your sacrifice. Unfortunately for you, uncommon good writing practices have become a mark of AI generated text, which is very useful.
Unfortunately you can't get your em dash back, ever. Sorry for the inconvenience.
tpoacher
Like hell we can't. Unsophisticated plebs (not you) viewing sophistication with suspicion is nothing new. And certainly no reason to demote one's standards.
Long live the em-dash. Or en-dash surrounded by spaces if you prefer UK style (which I do).
aitchnyu
You too can add footnotes to your presentations and documents stating all emdashes have been typed by a human.
nlawalker
I see “this matters,” “XYZ matters,” “the last two are what matter” etc. everywhere now in all sorts of workplace documents.
ktzar
The cringe part is when a real CEO says that in a speech.
TranquilMarmot
And then they pause for effect like they just dropped a huge truth bomb
vintermann
Well, but what matters... matters. We can't let AI style disgust stop us from explicitly saying what we think matters and why!
Animats
Sigh. I did write that personally, just as I have all my other HN posts. I'm moderately well known, and not anonymous. See www.animats.com.
I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were dismissed. Hence the somewhat out of character rhetoric.
We have organizations of people for the usual reasons. Scale. Specialization. Robustness against failure and errors. All those wins apply to structured groups of LLMs. So this has a reasonable chance of being useful. It's expensive at the moment, but probably cheaper than the management team it may replace.
For some reason, this idea seems to upset people. Unclear why. Comments?
stavros
I read the line and thought it was AI, and then saw the username and figured it wouldn't be. I find my writing being influenced by LLM patterns as well, because that's basically all the writing that exists these days. I don't like how it erodes my own voice because I keep reading the writings of this one single author all day, every day.
rob
FWIW, I thought it was human written. Pangram also said that it's 100% human written.
More likely, they're all wrong on this accusation. A bit concerning to see how many of them are throwing out a false positive like this. Makes me wonder how many of them are falling for actual AI traps in the real world. :)
wuschel
I am actually with you here. Such a system probably needs to be battle tested in a specific domain of business to see where the deficiencies at this stage are.
flir
Problem is, no matter how many sub-agents you break the LLM into it's still stochastic parrots all the way down. I've seen no evidence that compartmentalised harnesses can reach solutions that a monolithic harnesses cannot, so I'm thinking the compartmentalisation is just an excuse to throw more tokens into the token furnace - it doesn't unlock a step change in capability. If there is evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it.
There have been some successful attempts to do science like this (https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario). Denario generated 1k+ "solutions" on its way to winning the FAIR Universe challenge, and they all had to be fed through a fitness function of some kind to assess them. It also got stuck on a local maximum and had to be kicked in the ass by a human to get it off that.
When writing software, that fitness function is relatively closed (when I run it, does it do what I want?). With something as open-ended as managing a business... might as well roll dice, IMO.
My belief is that 20's LLMs have a lot in common with 90's GAs: the more clearly we can define "success" for a given task (the fitness function) the more successful they can be. Open-ended problems are somewhat beyond them right now, and, I suspect, forever.
(The comment that's currently at the top of the discussion, about making an "AI Boss" that remembered everything about the company, and fed the user three tasks a day? That's not an AI Boss, that's an AI Assistant with different framing.)
SyneRyder
Well, you mentioned Gas Town — that deserves an immediate reflexive downvote :P
I actually upvoted your post. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I was interested to see more discussion about it, and that felt worthy of an upvote.
As for the reaction against the idea, I see it from two angles. Is the standard corporate hierarchy / architecture really the optimal organization principle for AI? Or is that just a skeuomorphism to make this project seem more serious than it really is? Maybe Yegge did us a favor by mapping to Mayors & Polecats, forcing people to question if it really is the correct organizational hierarchy?
The other angle is heresy here - HN is full of employees now. There is little incentive for employees to be interested in what a C-suite does, and we see that with the comments about CEOs needing to be six foot and walk impressively. Employees have no interest in AI organization principles that optimize them away and highlights their obsolescence. I am surprised there hasn't been more discussion about how this specific project optimizes away the C-suite humans instead - I would have thought that could have had some appeal to employees, at least until those people realized it makes employees a swarm that works for AI leadership.
As for AI organization, the organizational mapping needs to be productive, not affectation or cargo-culting. That's not peripheral — that's load-bearing. Especially in a corporation model, you can find the organization layers only create busywork with lots of unnecessary middle managers. You don't want your AI C-suite swarm burning tokens on endless meetings about what should be in the upcoming meeting... especially not at Fable API pricing.
moring
It saddens me that we're banning speech patterns on HN, not discussing arguments. I have seen this in another thread yesterday(?), where somebody was accused of being an LLM based on speech patterns and downvoted, no further evidence needed. This site used to be above that level.
MarkSweep
It’s not about the LLM usage. It was such a dumb construction:
> <totally vague statement>. This matters.
Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it.
The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
jeltz
The site used to not be under constant assault of low effort LLM submissions and low effort LLM comments. That people start getting cranky about that is just normal.
jjmarr
I like how you have to constantly use the LLMs in order to understand their speech patterns enough to consciously reject them.
hansvm
Not in the slightest. I didn't touch the voting functionality and tried to be as nice as possible. I saw an opportunity to make somebody's life better for reasons it didn't seem they were aware of, since their speech seemed similar enough to certain AI idioms that I thought it would be demonized, and the fact that they wrote it anyway suggests they didn't know.
As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently.
> banning speech patterns
AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
bryanrasmussen
I mean on the one hand it is annoying because everybody has speech patterns, I like to say "I mean" and "on the one hand" a lot. On the other hand it seems a sort of self-protective recoil, nobody wants to spend a lot of time talking to an AI. Our jobs and society already make us spend way too much time and effort doing that!
On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway.
I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
hmry
Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.
The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.
> Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication.
So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
FeepingCreature
I like "and on the third hand." Like, yes I have three hands, what of it.
esseph
Do you shop at a third hand store?
bryanrasmussen
ah I thought I had forgotten to make the second hand, and so I went in to add it in, but then I got three hands, typical Hindu deity problem.
moron4hire
This site has had speech pattern bans built into it's software, aka "anti click bait" algorithms, for basically ever.
dgellow
It’s the whole internet, it’s not an HN problem. The AI industry is little by little invading and destroying every space where humans gather, removing everything that made genuine human interactions interesting and worthwhile.
(Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)
holoduke
Above is just AI slop. There is a good reason to be critical
holoduke
Why are you using AI for your account to write responses. It's mega annoying. A reason to leave this place. Please. No ai
jameslk
I get it’s a joke, and often a frequent cynical joke made here, but I actually think it’s a good thought experiment. Almost like a new Turing test
The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test
Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else
My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer
binary132
You’re presuming here that CEOs cause companies to make profit instead of serving as a scapegoat for their often unavoidable market dynamics (at best).
jameslk
In a 1-person company, who or what generates a profit?
root_axis
One person isn't a company. Legally maybe, but there's no point in a company if you can profitably do all the labor yourself.
sokoloff
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but need investors because I can’t afford the capital.
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but want to ensure continuity beyond my ability or interest to do the labor myself. (Sometimes this is by my wish; sometimes by the wish of consumers of my service.)
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but not want to expose my entire net worth to the financial obligations of the company.
There are plenty of cases where a single person company makes good sense.
jameslk
At what point does a company become a company if one person doesn’t make a company? What’s the threshold for non-labor where a company becomes a company?
root_axis
I'd start with division of labor as a minimum.
speleding
There are holding companies with zero employees. They typically pay a management fee to someone.
raegis
Attorneys commonly do this.
binary132
“I am actually the CEO of my basement office business” was not the corporate topology I was addressing with my comment.
dirkc
Just don't put it in charge of a company making paper clips
Cpoll
> nobody has a competitive advantage
This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It also presupposes that success is zero sum and winner takes all, which isn't always the case (example: when you're building out a new market segment, it can be beneficial to have competitors that are also building it out).
jameslk
> This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It’s the premise of the thought experiment: to be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve a competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment
I suppose you can claim that a profit can still be generated by offering a holistically worse service/product with no single advantage than a competitor because markets are not efficient, though this may be short lived
mannanj
Doesn't the incentive here, lead to privatizing the AI and possibly releasing a different product to the public - or at least with a delay? (not too unlike how the frontier labs work today).
jameslk
Yes I would think that would be the endgame goal. But in practice, I’m very skeptical a purely AI-driven executor can stay competitive when the market and government supporting it and surrounding it is driven by humans
hrideshmg
reminds me of trading algorithms
bell-cot
Yep. But, in most senses, trading algorithms don't need to interact with humans, or human society. Is the world around the "thought experiment" AI CEO dehumanized enough that that's also the case for it?
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
kelseyfrog
You're describing the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall[1], which, I'm sorry, is a Marxist idea so it's automatically wrong.
The very page you linked states that it's recognised as an empirical phenomenon by Adam Smith, who predates Marx.
ImHereToVote
I see what you did there.
jdiff
This kind of thought-terminating dogmatism is unwise.
gnunez
As an engineer, I love the idea of flipping the problem on its head. Don't get rid of the engineers; get rid of the CEO. That's brilliant.
But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune?
There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for strategic business advice, they tend to converge toward what is popular and trendy rather than necessarily what is best for the particular situation. They called this "trendslop," and described the response as,
"On strategy, LLMs might be more akin to a freshly minted MBA or junior consultant, parroting what's popular rather than what's right for a particular situation."
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 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.
senordevnyc
Surprise, surprise: everyone thinks other people’s jobs are easier to automate away than their own.
joquarky
> 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.
senordevnyc
Oh HN, why must you take everything so fucking literally lol
martythemaniak
I'm having a hard time seeing the recent AI layoff mania as anything different.
holtkam2
It doesn’t need to be perfect - it just needs to be as effective as a human CEO… luckily, many human CEOs suck at their job
senordevnyc
Is the average CEO worse at their job than the average software engineer is at theirs? I highly doubt it.
aiisjustanif
It’s apples to oranges at the end of the day, the question is why can one be automated and not the other.
socalgal2
It would be hilarious if the AI CEO also fired all the developers
tgv
Since LLMs tend to paraphrase what others have published about similar circumstances, chances are pretty high it will.
edoceo
What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
thelastgallon
> 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.
a34729t
Chinese humanoid robots are 3 years out from playing a decent round on a par 3 course.
psd1
Full self-drive and self-putt?
conductr
It’s going to be funny when the Tesla robots start showing up at tee times because the CEO couldn’t make it. Like a meeting agent taking notes for people who didn’t attend
newyankee
See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.
jaggederest
To paraphrase Andy Grove:
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
bronson
> AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not
Well, so do most CEOs.
parineum
There are hundreds of thousands of CEOs of companies you've never heard of.
edoceo
If the operation is to distill options into a few choices, and then pick the "best" one then, I think hivemind can win there too. Real-time democracy running a business.
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
jaggederest
Nope! that's the subtlety. "distill options" is not the CEO's (or any executive's) job.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
vasco
> Real-time democracy running a business
This is not a competitive advantage
DoctorOetker
Neither is dictatorship?
jeezfrk
Business actually treats a pseudo-dictatorship (with the requisite yes-men) as "good leadership".
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
vintermann
Sure, if by business you mean investors.
kian
is there a (4) or (5) that would be preferable? :)
parineum
It is.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
vintermann
As long as investors believe this, it matters less if it's true or not.
mrheosuper
>AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
dan_can_code
Enforcing culture is not something I believe is possible. Nobody is going to listen to the C suite suit over their own experience with their colleagues. People just end up saying the right buzzwords to appear that the culture has been adopted, but it will be mostly met with malicious compliance. If the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour,then that's a whole different ball game.
snoman
> Enforcing culture is not something I believe is possible.
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
expensive_news
At my current job, a 10 person startup, the CEOs job is to generate leads, talk to potential customers, and close deals. He, along with the other founders, shape what we work on based on what he thinks it’s possible for us to sell. He’s essential to the business.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
cybrox
Similar, yes, but instead of finding out who else can give you money at 10 people, they have to find out who else they have to give money at 10k people. Leads and lobbies.
vintermann
That's a sales person.
nkmnz
A sales person is usually trained on an existing product or portfolio of products (including services). A good sales person might use their exposure to customers for gathering valuable information to feed back into their upstream org. But this is completely different from someone who has to actively shape a both sides of the company, value delivery and value creation, because both need to mature in a choreographed manner.
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
moregrist
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
missedthecue
In companies large enough to have a board, the CEO's job is to manage relationships with customers, vendors, and wall street. If his company is big enough, he'll need to manage relationships with the government too. In fact, among founders whose business became big, the number one complaint you hear is how little of their busy day is spent on their actual product anymore.
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
andsoitis
> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
sandeepkd
This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
andsoitis
> This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
Freedom2
Like RTO mandates which were definitely made with wisdom.
andsoitis
Not all CEOs did that. Just like all software engineers aren't great or excellent, all CEOs aren't. But to categorically denounce seems rigid.
stale2002
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
rideontime
Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.
matchbok3
Workers are not legally or financially accountable for any of that. That is the whole point of a "job". I think you are confused.
JDups
When the worker loses their jobs over bad executive decisions, they sure feel like they were pretty harshly financially penalized for those decisions.
matchbok3
And they can get a new job? Or should people be in the same job all their life?
NegativeLatency
Neither are CEOs in our present society
rideontime
Are you confusing CEOs with founders, shareholders, etc.? Chief Executive Officer is, in fact, a "job."
SpicyLemonZest
Many people observe a limited subset of reality. It's highly visible when a company hits a crisis and people lose their jobs; it's much more common, but much less visible, for a CEO to get an after-hours call about a brewing problem which they must immediately work to smooth over.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
It’s amazing how many people on this website harp on about nobody noticing their hard work, nobody caring unless the server is down, etc, and not being able to conceive of the remote chance of this same phenomenon applying to other roles in an organisation.
rideontime
You truly don't see the difference between those two examples?
SpicyLemonZest
I'm not quite sure why you ask that? I'm not arguing that these two very different examples are the same, I'm explaining more concretely what it means to say that a CEO's job is to "to be responsible to the business".
rideontime
And you don't see being laid off due to the business's failure as being "responsible to the business"?
SpicyLemonZest
I do. It’s on the CEO’s shoulders the other 95% of the time. (Which again, I agree is not some horrible deal, it’s much more fun to be a CEO who’s stressed with too many calls than a blue collar worker who’s stressed about feeding their family.)
sandeepkd
I wish that was true some how. In real world unfortunately the buck stops at whoever is easy scape goat, at times it can be a CEO
Zanfa
Doesn't this usually just mean saying "I take full responsibility" and then firing a bunch of unrelated people?
a34729t
Rewponsibility is why we pay external consultants!
Zylokloto
Good ones actually are quite aware of the industry, connect the dots and setup the company to be sustainable, growing and ready when its time to be ready.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
inkyoto
In the current legal framework, AI can't be held accountable, a human being is required.
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
valleyer
Good point. CEOs of companies are often held personally accountable for corporate malfeasance by "the current legal framework".
fooker
I understand your sarcasm but that’s what the limited in LLC is for.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
valleyer
I agree. I just thought it was funny that someone was pointing out the legal unaccountability of an AI in this context.
inkyoto
There is no need for two penny sarcasm.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
vasco
The sarcasm was pretty funny so it has some utility, no need to be so serious
nradov
LLCs and other corporate structures only (mostly) protect employees and shareholders from civil judgments. CEOs and other executives are also at risk of criminal penalties for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) violations and similar. Actual criminal prosecutions of CEOs have been few, but not zero.
The typical corporate trick is to argue that the corporation itself is responsible for any wrongdoing, not a particular executive.
I can totally see this blame being shifted to AI in a "nobody got fired for choosing IBM" way.
swader999
Marketing and they hire and fire important people. That's about it though, where we should take the product, what features to do next, partnerships, these are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
collingreen
I don't think these things are obvious. I've worked at many places that have had big, company-changing forks in the road available to them and navigating those forks wasn't easy (and in my opinion several times we chose wrong). The crowd wasn't always right or even well aligned and sometimes the only agreement was that a middle of the road approach would be worse. My intuition says getting that right takes a lot of luck, good momentum, and a lot of departments working well together (bringing in and communicating market info, broadcasting marketing that works, making good partnerships, etc). The cynic in me thinks one big impact of a ceo is the various cheating and corruption tools that can make some of those things easier or at least less critical to get right (you don't need to make good cybertrucks or convince people to buy them if the government agrees to buy 450k of them as "armored vehicles", for example).
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
nullorempty
Well, as soon as they start being replaced is there a network to bring.
forestrywat
Managers coach and develop people. Helping them grow, nurturing their strengths and connecting them with opportunities that help them achieve more.
At least the good ones do.
mulderc
Yes, that is a good manager, but in my experience, it is better if the culture of the team is about ensuring everyone has opportunities to grow, build on their strengths, and connect with opportunities. When that is considered the manager’s job, and not the job of every member of the team, people get neglected, and many strengths and opportunities go to waste.
forestrywat
Best managers make this the core culture in the team.
mulderc
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." — God
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
Their job is to create an environment where people with a view as narrow and naive as yours can actually do something wholly productive.
sensanaty
They siphon away as much money as they can get away with , screw over their underlings and hop onto their golden parachutes whenever shit hits the fan, which with their short-sighted coke-fuelled decisions always happens.
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
volkercraig
CEO's exist as a sink for liability. When something goes wrong, they are the fall guys, that's ultimately their job. That's why CEO compensation is generally correlated strongly to earnings and they usually have golden parachutes.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
SlightlyLeftPad
They manage people. They’re people people.
baalimago
They ensure the company is funded.
gib444
This! They sell the company and vision to potential investors
penguin_booze
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
If you were legitimately suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a typical ‘CEO’, chances are you’d shit your britches within a month.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
meta_gunslinger
Exactly, as also evidenced by the guy who was brutally murdered just because he was the CEO of a company someone had an axe to grind against.
e36
This account is posting comments every 0.01 seconds.
bob1029
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours.
This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back.
I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip.
CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
Covenant0028
Ah yes, the unbearable burden of sipping fine wine at a Michelin star restaurant with a less than stellar company.
That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
midasz
The crux of this entire issue surrounding replacing people with agents, is that agents should pay taxes. If we're losing people that pay taxes our social safety nets will crumble. Maybe that makes the math more in favor of actually using humans too.
groestl
I'm fully in favor of a social safety net (a proper UBI even), but the tax system should tax what we don't want / keep within bounds, and I think in general we want more automation and more free time. So we should tax resource consumption. Short time, this might turn out the same (i.e. whether to tax agents through electricity consumption or agents directly might not make much of a difference) but I think long term this would align incentives across a few dimensions very well.
hdgvhicv
For decades we have taxed what we want - productive work - far more than other forms.
happymellon
It should be a clue that most of the people making the rules are generally considered nonproductive, or at least adjacent to and aspiring to be nonproductive.
groestl
And I think that is a major mistake, has many unwanted side effects, and only works because work supply does not yet exceed demand, so the taxes still keep flowing. But the relationship is beginning to break and I think a resource consumption based model helps with two very current challenges of society.
hdgvhicv
Helps who?
The people who make the rules (by brainwashing the population through a trillion dollar advertising industry what would make Pravda blush) only want to help themselves. As long as they have enough toys to prevent a French Revolution or for other people to take their wealth, they’re happy.
200 years ago, even 1000 years ago, the rich had to live in the same towns as the masses so they did actually put effort into keeping them nice. Building amenities, providing jobs, etc.
They don’t have to do that now. Power extends far beyond a 20 mile radius. They don’t have to go anywhere near the people.
wwind123
Taxing resource consumption, would likely encourage companies to optimize for less and less resource consumption. That by itself might be a good thing. But what if some day companies achieved the ultimate savings, using very little resource to produce the max amount of things. You'd get very little tax revenue to feed the society.
Of course, if those max amounts of things have few consumers because most people are just too poor to afford them, that'd make companies (or the agents that run companies) think twice too. At some point these AI agents might work together to come up with an economic system to make it possible for society to afford their products so they could further grow.
groestl
> most people are just too poor to afford them
I think a resource consumption based tax model extends very neatly to a UBI model. One could think of as: "this is the basic resource consumption we allow each person" and it automatically generates demand for basic services everyone should be able to afford with their share of resources, while keeping a free market and allowing an economy on top with extra resources. Standard money could still be the means for value exchange, just taxing works differently.
McDyver
Here's a wild idea: about the CEO and shareholders being properly taxed, instead? Every job being replaced by AI is with the purpose of making more money for the CEO and shareholders, right? So, tax them more. It would solve SO MANY issues
LIMEVINCE
Where do you draw the line to define an "agent" that should pay taxes? Many jobs once done entirely by humans have been replaced by software or mechanical automation long before AI came along. The issue of eroding social safety nets due to declining income tax revenue can be solved in a much more straightforward manner that doesn't require complex AI tax schemes.
XCSme
I don't think taxes are the main issue, but people losing their jobs.
We need UBI. Taxes are still there anyway, company income/profit tax, VAT, and maybe we can have other taxes too for automatically-generate income, same as with investments/dividend/gambling tax and stuff.
Doesn't this assume those people don't just find other jobs and continue to pay taxes?
midasz
Where does it end though? The most optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your viewpoint) say that AI will be able to replace or displace lots of professions. Is there enough work for everyone? Is there enough meaningful work for everyone? A software engineer or accountant making ~150k a year will find another job that pays less, so he will also pay less taxes. What's going to happen in the short term, inbetween this shift? A bunch of unhappy unemployed people leaning on social systems. That seems pretty devastating. Who is going to come out as winners?
hdgvhicv
Probably best to read dickens to see the future.
Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.
hdgvhicv
Owning, not penning.
tonyedgecombe
Expect more populist politicians promising things they can’t deliver and blaming whatever out group they dislike.
nextaccountic
Taxes can't replace people spending money and getting goods and services. Also, who said AI is getting paid well enough to afford paying taxes?
DarmokTanagra
How about we start making billionaires and their companies pay taxes first?
pmlnr
> The next session opens with a <past_decisions> block so the Executive remembers what it recommended last month.
This is morbidly unrealistic.
VSerge
Gotta love that they picked sonnet as default for the CEO and most execs..
exe34
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....", "<generic positive words that don't translate to actual actions or measurable improvements>".
I never saw LLMs coming.
torginus
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 said managers will make a good effort to shift blame.
So if your boss is an idiot and an a-hole, and you have to work twice as hard because of it, you are enabling the bad working conditions he's subjecting you to.
exe34
Thankfully my boss is actually great (he doesn't know me on here), and even the suits know enough to just leave us to get on with it while they play musical chairs.
joquarky
"You don't work for a company; you work for a boss."
I didn't realize this until far too late.
exe34
I already told my boss, if he leaves, I'm following him wherever he goes.
CraigJPerry
Yank on that thread harder, developers and engineers are not safe just because they rely on different patterns.
But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.
psd1
Optimal judgement is worth a premium... in some cases. In other cases, it's sufficient to merely keep trundling. Numerically more companies are boring than exciting.
MBAs are just components, and the cost of that component just went down.
Paradigma11
That an Executive would remember what he recommended a month ago?
hdkrgr
came here to make exactly the same comment
thelastgallon
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?
fassssst
So we work for the AI? AI should work for us.
kelseyfrog
Servant leadership
SpicyLemonZest
Servant leadership is a management cliche that works well as a counterbalance to the dominance hierarchy that's implicit in a human org chart. I'm not going to listen to a Claude instance telling me to do something I'd prefer not to do.
kelseyfrog
I wonder if the instance would send you a termination letter for that level of insubordination.
joquarky
Most of them could already retire comfortably.
So the only potential heat is boredom.
altmanaltman
No the best use is to replace hacker news commentors. Let them feel the heat for the fist time in their life.
See you can add anything there and the sentence will make sense.
I will never vote for an AI system to actually make laws lol wtf are you even saying
matchbok3
Feel the heat? As in, be punished? For what, exactly?
NegativeLatency
Wage theft
gigatree
They’re just doing what they’re told to do by the shareholders. They’re the largest cogs sure, but cogs nonetheless, and they’re replaced just as quickly when they fail to make choices that maximize profit above all else.
mfru
nobody becomes CEO because of being a cog, you have to intentionally seek it out and be actively willing to participate in the wage theft machine
marcus_holmes
For being egotistical psychopaths
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
Your comment is entirely emotionally driven. “These politicians! These bureaucrats!”.
Let me guess, it just happens that the role that you work in is amongst the only that actually provide value, and everything else is just waste.
Developers are among some of the least self-aware people ever, I swear. And I say this as a developer. The God complex instilled in techies in the ‘00s and ‘10s is unrivalled and I’m really enjoying seeing some of you being taken down a peg.
psd1
s/developers/CEOs/g
bashtoni
Based on my observations, the most important characteristics of a CEO is to be over 6ft, and to walk about looking important.
CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
cs02rm0
I'm 6'5 and a jobless software dev. If anyone has a CEO role going spare, let me know, I'll have a crack at it.
quaintdev
Same let us know people
overfeed
Are you also sociopathic, and can you speak confidently even when you're blowing hot air? How about your bullying and/or flattery skills?
juleiie
You guys are so daft about it. The fact that you do not see what work goes to keep company running and be responsible for thousands of people still having their jobs…
Some work is 24/7 basically, when you have to keep business afloat there are no sick days or worse days. Your brain is 24/7 preoccupied with the work.
Meanwhile you walk out after 8 hours and stop caring at all because - someone else does
Someone else grinds to provide you with employment so there is work at all and the company keeps sailing.
I am sure you guys are smart, adults. stop being so childish and immature. You are better than that
n4r9
Giving concrete examples of what work goes into the job would be more persuasive than ranting about how hard it is.
koito17
Board members often have posts at multiple companies because of how little work they actually do.
Meanwhile most companies prohibit side jobs for us plebians (sorry, "non-executives".)
smackeyacky
Boards are not involved in day to day decision making unless something has gone very wrong. The CEO shows up every day.
masfuerte
It's a shame there isn't something like github badges for CEOs. This post would merit a "Motivational Message Master".
hackable_sand
The best leaders know how to fraternize
voidUpdate
Found the CEO
totetsu
This is one thing I appreciate about Japan. There is so many short nerdy looking CEOs
kijin
Oh the other hand, Japanese businesspeople are exceptionally good at the "walk about looking important" part.
I'm under 6ft and have never been a CEO, so this appears to check out.
m463
Also, it has 4 legs, so it must be a cat.
mdp2021
(Corroboration, not deduction: "has four legs, so it is more probably a cat". That is vs falsification: "short, hence not all managers are tall". Which does not work anyway going from the logical context to the stochastic context, because it becomes "the exception that confirms the rule". I trust you knew, but.)
or, more probably I have used a fallacy to analogize the wrong fallacy :)
phendrenad2
As I always say, CEOs are corporate status symbols. "Look how successful we are, our CEO is super-handsome, went to William and Mary, and we pay him $15 million a year"
wisty
They're more like the winners of a pyramid scheme / MLM. You want everyone to see there's a winner so they all keep up the grind.
a34729t
My SVP is 6'4". 6 measly feet aint cutting it, that's just "king of manlets" territory.
> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.
dtj1123
This is not accurate. I've seen CEOs under 6ft wearing platform shoes do a perfectly good job of walking about looking important.
Waterluvian
You’d think culture and personality fit with a board of directors would be an easier feat for a robot.
kijin
Depends on the board. The premium CEO robot will be powered by a bio-ethanol fuel cell so that it can play golf with the board of directors for as long as drinks are available.
rl3
Premium? Just go to a local dive bar and find an alcoholic robot with a penchant for burping loudly and bending things (e.g. golf clubs).
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
HexPhantom
Humanoid robotics has been optimizing for the wrong benchmark this whole time. Forget dexterity, we need executive presence.
rl3
>Forget dexterity, we need executive presence.
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
gamblor956
The CEOs at my current job, last job, and previous job were all my height or shorter, and I'm several inches below 6ft.
blitzar
Challenge them to a measuring and take your rightful place at the top table.
rew0rk
It's a sign your in line to be the next CEO
dyauspitr
That’s how leaders throughout history have worked. Usually you prove your mettle in the first half of your career and then do the hard work of being the face of the company once you’re an executive. Diminishing what a leader does is the foremost underling cliché throughout all of history.
JauntyHatAngle
You're hearing the echo and ascribing it to the noise.
A constant push and pull between leaders and the led is the fundamental. Criticism in both directions is necessary and healthy, and at different times both correct and misplaced.
There have been great leaders and awful ones. Acting as if all leaders are proven and deserving is as asinine as naming all CEOs as useless.
Right now we are at a point where CEOs are biased towards being quite anti worker and too easily rewarded. It's not surprising the cliches against them come out.
ttoinou
Maybe you simply don’t hear about great CEOs, so there is a bias
JauntyHatAngle
I would argue the bias is for ceos (of public companies) to act a certain way due to inherent incentives the way the world is set up, which biases their personality. But I won't go into that old argument again.
seydor
Just add some antenna on top
SpaceNoodled
Shit, why ain't I a CEO, then?
SlightlyLeftPad
Based on my observations, ahem research, you must not have fired developers to make room for AI. Therefore, you are not qualified to be a CEO.
win311fwg
Using HN instead of walking around looking important
phaedryx
I think either gray hair or bald does a lot too.
YZF
6 feet balding and gray here. Can pretend to walk importantly. Never felt farther than CEO. Maybe it's a sign I need to start my own company.
eklavya
This is the most reddit thread I have seen on HN ever.
hawaiianbrah
Unfortunately, it seems like they’re becoming more common in the last 6-12 months.
manjalyc
The timeline has been
Last 5-6 years: COVID surge in HN brings in more people
Last 3-4 years: General rise in AI topics which have broad appeal and brought in a lot of people
Last 2-3 years: More overtly political discourse on HN bringing in more people
Last 1-2 years: Bots start coming in, some are very obvious, but they have gotten better and better to the point its hard to tell anymore.
Last year: Sharp rise in shallow redditor-style comments, especially in cultural/political discussions comments that are snarky but contribute little to discussion outside of affirmations like "Laws are for poor people"
petra
True. Well what can be expected from a thread with that hilarious title?
matheusmoreira
Awesome. There's no reason why AI can't replace all these highly paid CEOs along with the rest of us. Looking forward to the Delamain future.
bigstrat2003
Do you think that they will offer the Excelsior package for sale?
setgree
Jeremy Irons's CEO character in _Margin Call_ explains his job like this:
> Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks?... I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
I'm sure many CEOs are bozos who can be replaced by a statistical averaging and guessing machine. But this skill of saying "it's time for us to dramatically change course because the music has stopped" seems to me very contrary to the current LLM paradigm. RL makes the chatbot agreeable ('aligned'). But changing course is inherently disagreeable. It makes enemies and people are going to try to talk you out of it at every turn. I think we'll need a new idea of what LLMs are for, and how to train them, before they can do that. (Much easier to mimic and therefore replace a Ballmer than a Nadella, in other words.)
“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”
such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights
Other gem from my new CFO:
“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”
And my new C(3-)PO just told me
“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get?
#5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
cwillu
Searching for PLG, I found: “In short, companies that use PLG models gain another revenue-generating channel: the company’s product itself.” What a world we live in, that a company's products being a revenue-generating channel is an innovation worthy of note!
estetlinus
The product is becoming load-bearing. That’s not new. That a word salad factory, and you just punched in.
altmanaltman
The only thing worse than a human CEO is an AI CEO with power to fire you. People just don't think it will do stupid things, have nonsensicle orders which they have to follow, and likely fire people left right and center.
But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
psd1
The joy in this thread is not anticipation of a better workplace - it's schadenfreude.
jroseattle
Watching the demo video, they haven't created open executives. They've created open managers.
It looks like most of the work of the package is reactive -- monitoring external things and responding. It's not proactive just because a person didn't dial it up.
But, here's the thing -- this can likely replace many executives right now, at least those who are reactive managers. I'm in full support -- automate those things if you can.
AI is coming for judgment jobs. It seems it's turtles all the way down.
yunnpp
An auditable executive would certainly be a first.
slifin
I think this is an interesting idea but the non tech parts need fleshing out a bit if only to fire the imagination
The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal
In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more
I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
arjie
I think it's pretty fun. Worker cooperatives no longer need different ranks of executive officers. They can all be peers with different functions. So if worker cooperatives are going to succeed in the US, they have pretty good conditions right now.
Grosvenor
This reminds me of William Gibson's "Burning Chrome", where the head of a syndicate is a Russian AI (Chrome) running things behind a smuggling front. Gibson basically predicted the AI CEO forty years early!
A warning: Don't burn Chrome.
mdp2021
Time to read Mona Lisa Overdrive and see what we are still waiting from the future then.
BTW: not all predictions from Neuromancer are there yet...
holoduke
I really want to see a proper ai team that successfully replaced a bunch of people. I have not seen it yet. Only thing I hear is gold plated stories about the potential of agents running fully automated workflows without people touching a single lever.
In the meantime I am using AI almost the entire day. I have to discuss these topics with managers that only use chatgpt and watch youtube videos from people disguised to promote their own crap AI products. All I can say is that AI is not good enough to replace entire teams. It can do some cool stuff. But automate entire workflows. Nah. It's just not gonna work.
rdudek
I've been slowly developing my hermes agent to do something similar but is very customized towards my needs. I should spin up another agent and give this one a shot and see what it's capable of. This is hilarious.
rmah
I'm sure their AI can simulate bad executives very effectively. Good ones, not so much. Humorously, the set of agents don't include an AI CEO, just the execs underneath the CEO. Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency (yet... thank the gods). Finally, the tasks their LLM agents can supposedly do are more the tasks that the executive's staff handles, not the executive themselves. Unless it's a smaller company, I guess.
wuschel
I have no experience with data on bad and good CEOs depending on their working context.
At this stage, this seems to be a demo, albeit an interesting one. I find the concept still very intriguing, as it is exactly the thing that attacks white collar functions in administrative and executive tasks sets. I need to give it a spin.
mr_toad
> Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency
The board might have to take on a more active role in instructing the CEO, just as someone managing an LLM now has to be careful how they prompt it.
God forbid the board should make to do more than show up for a few general meetings and collect a fat cheque.
yipinwong
This won't work for everyone or every field.
Organizations/Biz requirements (be it scope, money, HR, etc) changes depending on the size thereof.
This assumes that whatever your biz is, it's at Google level. It's too much. Sometimes you need just few employees (few agents) to get the things done.
This app will overcomplicate flows just like in real life.
The only lesson I will take from app is how SenteLab created the service, and why (<- so you know when to use this or not)
cactusplant7374
What company fired them? I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it.
deepamt31
eight specialist agents behind one executive voice is the open source CEO they shipped. the CHRO agent still owns hiring and performance.
dchftcs
This is good for satire, but the real solution is to use AI to become the CEO, or take over the scope of of product or decision-making roles. There are many business-savvy technical workers that get pigeonholed because they spend most of their cognitive effort on low-level technical details. This is an opportunity for these people to rise up and prove they work better than people who manage or direct them. CEO is really not a role to automate, unless it's a fully autonomous business that has zero humans.
Animats
Is this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?
GrumpySciGuy
Highly configurable. Looks like it is targeted at any level of management. The key features seems that it can generate its own vision of how to move something forward and that it can be set with degrees of freedom depending on the use case. Video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_g97xxVTMk
shermantanktop
The speech model for the voiceover should be named “Max Vocalfry.”
georgemcbay
> Is this automated CEO any good?
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
jayroh
Peak comment right here
s1artibartfast
Not every company needs a CEO, and that is ok. Companies do however need a decision making process and clear authorizations.
Creating an AI executive suite can bring some skills to the table, but it doesn't solve the authority question. I'm curious how this would work in practice...
What happens if the AI decides it wants to commit funds - does it have authority?
What if it wants to change direction? What if it wants to fire a developer?
mr_toad
As a shareholder I’m optimistic about the possibility of using LLMs for senior management positions, and on down. C level executives are rare, expensive and often unpredictable quantities. LLMs, if proven to work, could be easily cloned, relatively cheap to run and as a bonus they’re unlikely to get involved in improprieties with their subordinates.
janalsncm
To the extent this is tongue in cheek it is funny, but I could imagine if I was building a startup I’d like something like this if it was good.
That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.
Why should this be an installed program that uses agent SDK API calls instead of a prose skill to be used with existing agents? It builds "eight specialist AI agents". I'm just wondering what kinds of requirements might cause you to decide to build your own agent architecture rather than use existing ones?
misiek08
So.... is it overpaid.lol[1], but this time real implementation? :)
I always cringe when I read this kind of thing, even if it might be true on some level.
stuaxo
Would like to see the opposite of this, since most agree MBAs are awful.
GrumpySciGuy
A team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.
ThrowawayR2
Corporate officers, including CEOs, have to be "natural persons" (legal jargon for flesh-and-blood humans) either directly by law or indirectly as a practical matter so the attempted turnabout falls flat on its face.
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
bee_rider
I’d be more interested to see a collection of independent guild, unions, and co-ops that voluntarily coordinate through an AI intermediary.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
jayemar
Couldn't "indirectly as a practical matter" be interpreted as what this project is attempting to challenge?
ThrowawayR2
How so? Even in a jurisdiction where corporate officers aren't required to be a natural person, trying to have an AI CEO is like trying to make a cat/dog a CEO. As a practical matter, it is not a legal entity recognized as capable of entering into agreements so no government or other business will accept legal documents, contracts, etc. signed by the AI CEO or signed by a human claiming to act under the AI's (not valid) authority as CEO delegated to them. If I had to guess the latter would likely be considered fraud.
Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.
forgetfreeman
Neat. Hire an intern to prompt the "CEO" as needed. Problem solved.
ThrowawayR2
This is one of those rejoinders that tries to be clever but really, really isn't. The "intern as fake CEO" is left holding the bag because it's their signature on contracts and other legal documents. The idea of puppet CEOs to fraudulently dodge accountability existed well before LLMs became a thing. Courts see right through that kind of scheme plus the "intern" is likely to turn coat against the mastermind to save their own skin at the first sign of trouble.
forgetfreeman
If you think CEOs are the primary legal signatories for their company you might need to spend some time away from garage band startups. Companies maintain entire legal departments for a reason.
cwillu
If the paperwork says the intern is the CEO, then the intern is the CEO, regardless of how much the intern's agent's github says otherwise.
forgetfreeman
Yep. You're starting to catch on. Same functionality, significant cost savings for the organization.
cwillu
The intern might be convinced to do something other than what the bot says.
forgetfreeman
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of folks would gleefully avoid rocking the boat if handed a job this cushy. If they do flake out you could ask if anyone in facilities would like to take a break from emptying trashcans...
ithkuil
Then the board can fire that CEO?
VohuMana
This is hilarious, I feel like we are going to see AI companies add something to the system prompt or terms of service that explicitly forbids having an LLM act as CEO. Honestly though I do hope this gives pause to the C suite when it comes to replacing people with AI
josefritzishere
AI CEOs are the way of the future. If you want to reduce overhead costs, the maximum save will be produced replacing the bloated salaries of the C-suite. This is the most inevitable ROI play presented by AI.
pojzon
So when we can fire C suite? Not like they do any meaningful work beside paying themselves tens of millions of bonuses.
Ah - never ? Because corpo ladder is rigged? Ok, thats what I thought.
ottoflux
I’ve been saying people need to do this for over a year. I’ve known (personally) quite a few executive leaders and while I don’t think AI is a good replacement for any _good_ person at a job, the executive team is the low hanging fruit.
We glamorize execs but at the end of the day if you watch their careers they have plenty of failures (usually) and generally fail upwards. I’ve known some amazing CTOs and VPs of engineering and they’ve brought more to the table but a lot of what the executive team does is looking at the currents in the industry and trying to make educated guesses about where things are going. Yes more than that but this is a news.y comment.
pythonRon
Perhaps this AI CEO will bring an end of all this over-paying of top management. Running a corporation isn't rocket science; it's just a matter of putting profit above everything else. Any idiot can do that.
thewhitetulip
Remember that guy who applied for CEO OpenAI and said that he will replace the CEO and the board with a chatbot
I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs
theodorewiles
I think AI CEOs are dumb but AI 'enterprise decision-makers' could be very very interesting.
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
ouraf
And who will the shareholders blame when the business go under?
Gerard22Aug
"CEO-abliterated" Model got uploaded to HF. Nvidia bought HF. U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications. Developers went back home. CEO received bonus. 2.5x larger than last year.
noxss
At some point someone will make a big company from zero managed completely by AI and the owner will just do investing. We just need an open source IA that get the IA hiring stuff.
bwhiting2356
Many CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.
OutOfHere
The difference is that the CEO controls the capital and has the ear of the investors, whereas the developers generally don't. It's the investors that control whether the CEO is a bot or not.
matchbok3
Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.
s1artibartfast
Interesting point, but CEO is not necessarily the same as owner.
For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?
I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .
icehawk
What are your qualifications to say that?
esseph
> Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.
Prove it.
> be a leader
There are a lot of bad "leaders" out there running Fortune 500s, fwiw.
If you just want a sociopath with faux accountability that's not very difficult, dime a dozen.
matchbok3
The world is a whole lot more complicated than the simplistic "CEOs are evil" nonsense. I suggest you talk to an entrepreneur sometime. Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly. Or is it too hard for you?
esseph
> I suggest you talk to an entrepreneur sometime. Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly.
I've been a founder, CEO, and combat leader under fire in Iraq.
> Or is it too hard for you?
I guess, clearly, it wasn't. Have you ever lead men in combat when death is real and you are right there as the tip of the spear, with some of the smartest and most high level athletes in the world?
A lot of fortune 500 CEOs are nepo or network hires to grease wheels and laws, but even then, it's not necessary merit or performance based. There are some good ones, but there are more bad ones than good. All will write books on "leadership"!
A lot of you calling things "leadership" in large companies can be done with fairly basic calculations and you don't even need a high functioning sociopath to take the blame. That doesn't mean you don't have a board judging performance.
Also a lot of you are taking things very personal, thinking most of these comments and complaints are talking about some CEO of a 5 or 500 person company, but what many of us are talking about are companies with 50k-100k employees or more (then there's Amazon with over a million).
But yeah...
> "Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly”
Take your own advice.
I'll see you on the front lines.
zombot
If a company embraces AI at all, this should be the first step. Replace the MBA bots with actual bots. Imagine the amounts of budget becoming available for sensible purposes.
__MatrixMan__
If human-led companies started consistently losing to AI led companies... would it say more about the intelligence of AI, or about how thoroughly power corrupts humans?
Steve16384
I'm surprised this hsn't happened sooner. Surely making decisions as a CEO would be easier for an AI then complex software development.
nullorempty
Let's also replace politicians and other officials.
AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere".
Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.
hypfer
If people would unironically start pushing for this, I genuinely do not know what to do.
I guess that would be at least a nice bang to let democracy finally die.
Let's hope that we never see that happening.
___
To expand on that:
I believe that these thoughts are so incredibly harmful to humanity itself, (and, more importantly, I believe that the people in power believe that too,) that we'd be seeing pushback against this.
Maximum pushback, because what the pushback would be defending would be - as said - humanity itself.
Said pushback would be bypassing democracy, because there is no way of arguing with these crazy thoughts. Which would said a precedent, because why stop there.
Which, again, makes me believe that this is some sort of psyop, because I refuse to think that the people on here would really be as blind to the systemic implications of their brainfarts.
___
FWIW, a ruling class worth their net worth would go for the less draconian thing of simply taking away your internet access and forcing you to touch grass.
One that is.. uh.. less signed up on the whole "all people are equal and worth saving" would line up.. idk.. 100 people with these horribly bad-for-humanity ideas and shoot them in the head live on stream or something.
The interesting twist here is that LLM rulers might be more biased towards doing option B, as the statistical probabilities of words cannot _feel_ the chemical hormone cocktail invoked by the mental image of that.
Be careful what you wish for.
veasmkii
Who's to say having a CEO/AI or not is even a good idea. Whilst the practice is common.... I do wonder if there are better ways of organising?
jmyeet
This has likely been the case as long as jobs have existed. Some CEOs spend their entire time tweeting, apparently.
The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.
The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.
Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.
Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.
Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.
The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
maerF0x0
> manager's manager's manager
These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing.
No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
hart_russell
This makes me happy. There’s nothing I hate more than non technical people who don’t put in the work then reap most of the reward.
0xbadcafebee
But can it avoid answering direct questions by telling you about past challenges and what it's doing to address those next year?
number6
So with developers automated and CEO automated, can we now start with the first fully automated companies?
andy_ppp
So did they train the AI to be superior to everyone and make bad decisions and never ask for clarification?
newsomix9xl
Awesome!!!
This is the best project ever.
I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)
petesergeant
As much as I love Claude/Fable, I have recently found Sol to be dramatically better at this kind of task
thih9
AI providers and NVIDIA profit either way.
Which is not bad in itself, but I wish there was a way to balance this out.
bentt
Surrendering our strategic decision making to AI is definitely how we speedrun to Skynet.
chanux
Good thought experiment but the flip side works just as well.
Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.
willmadden
Better headline: Developers prove they have no idea or appreciation for what a CEO does.
drTobiasFunke
One thing AI is actually good at: look at a bunch of data, make informed, unbiased, objective and quick decision, have a backup plan if that fails.
This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).
thewhitetulip
> unbiased
How? If the bias is in the dataset itself, then it'll be in the LLM decision also, right?
Retro_Dev
> unbiased
Asking models about politically sensitive events differ WILDLY based on the country that produced that AI.
drTobiasFunke
Oh, not in that sense. I meant if you showed it data and business metrics, and asked for s tough decision, it is likely not going to make a decision by factoring in the race of the manager whose team isnt doing great, or get influenced because another executive is its beer buddy, or because the finance guy used to work with the AI at a previous job.
I am talking about these biased a human manager or executive will most certainly have. We have all seen it.
busyant
I'm waiting for the press release where both organizations merge.
jgilias
Would be cool to get this thing try and run the vending machine experiment.
frank00001
This was fun and it will probably produce some nice output, but developers in particular, have a tendency to don´t see the value in being able to inspire and lead people. Being a leader is mainly people work, and AI cannot replace that.
avodonosov
A country government next
insane_dreamer
the main job of a tech CEO these days is to 1) raise money, 2) keep the board happy.
I don't see either of those being able to be done by an AI agent.
rektomatic
That repo is so thin, probably just took one prompt.
bwest87
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. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default.
* Having courage to do the correct, obvious thing even when your team or investors don't think it's the right call. (This might be firing someone everyone likes but who's role is no longer needed, it might be changing strategies away from the product everyone just spent 6 months on, etc. etc. the list goes on). -> Ben Horowitz has called this kind of decision basically the entire value of a CEO. This is also EXACTLY where today's LLMs keep getting worse and worse. They are utterly spineless.
* Having unique skills and credibility to build a team -> This can come from many sources (track record, vision, charisma, specific achievements, network, etc.) , but people need to want to join YOUR team, not someone else's. They have to believe that YOU are going to win against the market. There is no way you're going to have an edge by using a commercially available AI API with an open source harness at the helm. That is just so utterly uncompelling to top candidates.
* Fundraising -> On the surface, very ammenable to AI, but again, as an investor, would you seriously invest in a CEO that is literally replicatable by any other company?
The value I can see for something like this is a human to get a "2nd pair of eyes". But humans have tons of advisors already and generally speaking, getting takes on what you should do as CEO is not the hard part. It's seeing through the fog of war, finding clarity, and then implementing that clarity across the org, which is surprisingly hard.
psd1
That rhymes with the reasons why AI can't replace engineers.
VCs likely won't demand that you be replaced with a claude subscription. But shareholders might wonder why they should approve a fat package for a meatbag. Private equity, picking over dinosaurs, won't hesitate.
Lindy Fiorina hacking up HP? That job is now mechanised.
nitwit005
> Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default.
Most human CEOs are disqualified then. Whenever I join a company these days, they stress how important the company's values are, and they are somehow basically the same as every other company.
brazukadev
Everything you described can be replaced by someone + AI. With a much better quality than replacing devs with someone + AI.
respectattentio
After firing all, when CEO can fire themselves to be just founders?
This will be epic.
walrus01
looks like a good way to run up a really large anthropic token bill.
rrrx3
Needs dumber, less capable models for the exec roles.
HomeDeLaPot
When will we see the world's first fully autonomous company?
__MatrixMan__
If you want to see that idea extrapolated to an impressive extent, check out Accelerando by Charles Stross. If Stross was right we're in for a bumpy ride.
lc9er
It was definitely not a hopeful glimpse into the future.
I'm really not sure why people are cheering for this.
We've been rightfully pissed at companies doing unethical things and getting away with it, as there is simply nothing you can hurt them with.
Why is HN fantasizing about making the companies even less hurtable? Are people here insane? Otoh, a lot of those accounts are just a few months old, so.. welp. Nice psyop we got here.
hypfer
I dislike performative business people as much as the next guy, but you can't tell me that you people really think that this is anything other than a petty and equally performative PR stunt.
Revenge of the nerds.
pcblues
A CE0 is only as good as their investors.
shrubby
This is brilliant! Immediately forwarded to the boss.
zx8080
Do they have human CEO currently? Just curious.
FuturisticLover
Can I use this tool without the Anthropic API? I'm thinking of hosting it locally and running it through the CLI instead of connecting to the API.
I have a Claude Pro account.
NietTim
Pro tip: you can ask claude this
FuturisticLover
Cool
skirge
there's unemployment due too lack of CEOs (companies). AI CEO solves this problem. Full employment can be achieved.
ynac
Just like working with Ai on dev projects is like working along side a really smart but drunk buddy, an Ai CEO is like being guided by a coked up business coach. In the end, with Ai where it is, I think it could maintain a company already moving along with healthy systems and a known cycle. But same as where Ai fails on larger dev projects, the same happens with a business. The timing for stepping back and diving deep is critical to seeing opportunities for growth, avoiding pitfalls, and doing the daily maintenance required to keep any project alive in the long-term.
alansaber
We're all joking around here. But 5 decades down the line, with increasing cognitive offload to AI, is a slow erosion leading to this end state so crazy?
hypfer
Yes
1vuio0pswjnm7
Is the HN title editoriallized
nullorempty
Honestly, this is hilarious!
Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!
GrumpySciGuy
It can be configured to replace any mangagment role. The goal is to do for management what co-pilot, cursor and Claude did for development.
reillyse
Everyone seems to be missing the point of the role of the CEO.
The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.
No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.
root_axis
Yes, this is actually a reason why an AI executive could be a formidable alternative in theory.
The CEO is ultimately an employee of the board, and managing the CEO with respect to the board's oversight and interest is a somewhat adversarial challenge.
However, the AI CEO's intentions are fully transparent to the board and entirely pliable to the board's demands. The AI CEO also offers the board the opportunity to retain significant equity shares that materially impact their wealth - in this way AI executives stand to be an even more tantalizing target than fixed labor costs.
Of course, this presumes LLMs will become reliable enough for this, which doesn't seem likely.
tqi
I would argue that many companies would in fact be better off disappearing for a year, rather than constantly thrashing the company to chase the latest trend.
And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...
glouwbug
> should be able to disappear for a year
But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off
cosmodisk
If a ceo can disappear for months and still return into a company that isn't on fire,it means they have a functional company. It means there are processes and people in right places to run things in a continuous manner. This isn't as common as people might think. I've seen many companies where people can't survive for a few days without ceo because the position is tied to a million things( often unnecessarily). There's an old saying about owning a business: if you leave and it still runs it means you have a business, otherwise it's just a job
glouwbug
Right, if a janitor can leave the hallways for a week and they're still clean on his return we should let him go
lmaj
Yes. Your point is?
glouwbug
That the janitor did a good job cleaning the hallways and building enough of a reputation amongst those in the building to not trash the hallways
brettermeier
I love it! Go after the CEOs!
IronWolve
Finally a use for Grok Bots!
Brajeshwar
I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs.
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
ryandrake
I think a lot of this kind of talk treats the C-Suite as special, mystical "visionary" people who Know Things We Can't Know, and by virtue of this otherworldly magical power, are uniquely qualified to do their jobs. Like the average person with basic knowledge of his business and industry can't possibly choose one service provider out of 10 bids, or set business priorities, or drive and enforce culture. We're not talking about wizardry here.
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
thelastgallon
This is absolutely spot on. CEO/C-Suite/VPs are surrounded by gatekeepers (usually something like the PMO org, program management) who feed them with garbage info. Even if a top level leader is genuinely interested in making things better, they would never know because the gatekeepers firewall any competent person.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
cosmodisk
There are some exceptional executives out there with strong vision, ability to execute and build. Those are rare. The rest are just a bunch of people who had risen to the position because of whatever. They often don't have any special knowledge or skills and succeed mostly because of how the system works. For instance, I can't imagine what one would need to do to fuck up in a company like Coca-Cola. It's super well established, supply chains are golden, everything works,etc. So does success in such a company really mean the executive is some sort of visionary genius? Absolutely no.
Omniusaspirer
CEOs are probably by and large less technically competent than the average technical line employee, but what companies are actually paying for is personal connections to power structures that can be leveraged for profit. Look at someone like Condoleezza Rice- almost certainly her political science doctorate imparted her with no real technical knowledge, yet she's served on the boards of C3.ai, Chevron, HP, Dropbox, Transamerica, Charles Schwab and a million other vague leadership positions for other entities in fields she almost certainly lacks any competence in.
sapphicsnail
> Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
ThrowawayR2
- A developer continues to get paid if they accidentally write a bug that needs to be fixed, even if if it costs the business money to fix it.
- A CxO continues to get paid if they accidentally make a bad business decision that needs to be fixed, even if it costs the business money to fix it.
If you want a model where employees have to give up compensation for their mistakes, it would affect low ranking employees far more harshly than it would affect executives.
pdhborges
> A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
RIMR
I like pushing the idea that an executive's job is both expensive and automatable. It's true, and they don't want people to figure that out.
But I do not like the idea that an AI like this could end up ranking higher than human beings in an org chart. That is still pretty dystopian.
Great, now this open source CEO can fire people automatically, and replace them with open source agents. The whole organization finally gets replaced with AI. Time to invest and become a shareholder!
arthurcolle
what's the backstory here?
GrumpySciGuy
Op here. Team was let go. Decided to do a startup. We thought that tools like co-pilot and Claude code were transforming development. We wanted to transform management (not just CEOs). We open sourced this knowing that if people find this useful (and we hope they do) we can get a support work out of it (similar to the Redhat model and other open source tech).
cmiles8
Honestly the best use of AI at the moment is to replace non-technical middle management layers. Many of those yelling the loudest for “more AI now” are quite ironically holding the jobs best replaced by the current creation of AI.
lsofzz
Awesome. Fuck these CEOs and their `yatchs`!
Let's replace these motherfuckers.
baalimago
Good luck finding investments by going to events in socal
_pdp_
Lol. Is anyone actually taking this seriously?
fedeb95
Now we just need to add x402 and we have a startup.
pythonRon
LOL! Hiarious! Take that, management!
iugtmkbdfil834
Now, lets build some synergy!
Brian_K_White
NOW we're talking. The ceo is the lowest paid position.
nullbio
ChatGPT (or something from OpenRouter) should be the default model. Stop promoting Anthropic's business when they're so hostile to the developer community.
fodkodrasz
All AI vendors are hostile to the developer community. This is by definition: they are creating replacements of developers.
sinpif
I know it's a joke but...
Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.
If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
hypfer
> Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.
No. Oh my god no.
This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed.
Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but the jump to "all are like this" is crazy, and, more importantly, anti-intellectual.
ThrowawayR2
Relax and enjoy the circus, dude. This is the reality of the tech profession as it is today and all we can do is laugh and tighten our hiring practices.
sinpif
Wait a minute, so you (and your colleagues) deploy this thing, it tells you half the staff should go so the company can stay afloat. You GO?
sinpif
Because what I meant by that of course was power over money. You turn it on, put in the credit card info and let it rip, eh?
firefoxd
We've replaced our CEO for the better part of 6 weeks now. He has been on a media tour promoting a product we no longer sell, but it keeps him busy while we continue to grow.
While Proxy AI [0] is not open source, it is free, it is built from pure garage energy, and we are having our summer sale right now. 20% off for HN users.
Yeah, this is actually one of the best uses for AI, I think. Boring decisions that you have to take, but without all necessary knowledge, based on history that can be learned and summarised. And it's all a lot of luck, and nothing is 100% a good or a bad decision. Algorithms won't help. It makes total sense to me to make it openly heuristic and based on propabilities and therefore use AI.
Just like in Iain Banks's scifi (although those AIs are actually intelligent -- I don't think you need that for a CEO).
Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do.
But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.
I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.
Doesn't apply to AI.
Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.
And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.
This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.
For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.
Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.
Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".
Most software is dime a dozen.
Not at all.
But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.
https://juliawolffenotes.home.blog/2019/08/28/robot-shell-co...
Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.
When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.
Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...
Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.
Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.
Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.
Overall health: mixed.
Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.
The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.
You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.
(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)
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, on the other hand, seen boards pile all the blame onto the C-Suite. Seems easy enough to pile the blame on an AI.
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).
This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.
True! And true all day long
If we restored the 1950s tax code that discouraged mergers and kept CEOs from grifting, everything you were concerned about stops happening. Businesses were way more honest when there are thousands of local and regional competitors. Federal tax cuts let CEOs merge everything.
Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team:
Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well.
e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist:
1. is it an issue with the work being given?
2. is it an issue with another co-worker?
3. are they having a family issue?
4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details
5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc
Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below:
- event no one at the company has seen before
- the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out
- those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company
examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy):
a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel
b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away
I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).
The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration.
As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.
The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control
Good point re expert systems. I need to look up what actually made them fail, or how they are not scaling.
Have you been working in the space?
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 just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
Even as a temporary consultant, at a company for only a couple of months, I remember seeing the CEO walk the hallway, greeting every single person on the way between a meeting room and the bathroom. I can barely remember my family member's names, or the last thing we talked about, let alone have the memory space for all that information to seem kind and courteous to "low level" employees.
In my entire career, I've never worked at a behemoth-sized company, though, so my experience has been much more "intimate" environments, and primarily in consulting firms or satellite offices away from the main HQ (even by only a couple blocks some times). So everyone in the office knew each other.
Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated:
1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others.
2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
I had a physics prof ~20 years ago who made a point of memorizing the names of every one of his intro physics students by the second week.
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?
this depends heavily on what is easier to do: social engineering or prompt engineering.
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.
Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.
Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.
Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.
For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.
VC: "Hi, I'll offer you $3.75 for 95% equity and a load bearing position on the board"
CEO Bot: "You're absolutely right. Agreed!"
It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.
Top CEO agrees
You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0]
It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example.
0: https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-tr...
Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.
I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things.
These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee.
CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.
If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc
All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.
Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.
Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr...
Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
Press X to doubt.
In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.
Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.
also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai
In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum".
The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology.
In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails.
Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.
Frankly, "AGI" just seems like a return to Antebellum slave economics.
Free labor is a C-suite's wet dream, and it has been since the 1520s.
Yeah "AI" doesn't work but that doesn't matter. Your boss believes that there is a coin-operated robot slave that is smarter than you, never gets tired, and never talks back. Good luck getting that raise now, asshole.
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".
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 happens to align with the current in the river.
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. That’s where our current one came from after all. They are the intellectual and social descendants of the mercantile capitalists who overthrew the feudal order.
It’s pretty common for the new boss to end up becoming the old boss because they are also monkeys with the same limbic system.
Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
I also suspect really deep change would require genetic modification that alters the structure of the human central nervous system, since a lot of this stuff is just ape behavior writ large.
My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
* The canonical book on the subject - The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882
* https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/what-is-distr...
* https://practicaldistributism.com/distributism-basics/
And not directly related, but full of mineable thoughts, the papal encyclicals of the last 100 years on economy, including Rerum Novarum (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...), Quadragesimo Anno (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docume...), Centesimus Annus (https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...), and the very latest Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...)
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.
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
> My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.
The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
Of course that would go against the class war idea, then you can't blame others anymore. You'd have to accept how this objective improvement to your life as a labor income dependent person would also crush your own dreams of earning capital returns yourself.
“I’m just doing what the market rewards” and “if I don’t, the next guy will” are the 21st century billionaire’s “I was just following orders.” It creates a race to the bottom.
Warren Buffett
This in turn leads to every problem being abstracted out of its context, and attributed to malice instead of error. Thinking this way completely hampers the ability of human beings to make incremental progress on anything at all via net-positive social engagement with each other.
The "class struggle" idea is of the most debilitating memetic diseases that's ever come about in human history.
Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own boundaries inside a continuum of variation, and where you draw them is something you're choosing based on the purposes you are pursuing and the assumptions you have made, not mapping out something that's intrinsic to the external world independently of you. "Category X includes object Y" is a property inherent to the definition of category X; it is not a quality inherent to object Y.
And when the things you're classifying are other people, and you're trying to develop a taxonomy that models their behavior, you have a situation where the entities you're analyzing are self-aware beings whose behavior is driven by the analytical models and taxonomies in their minds, not the ones in yours.
People who propose class theories as a usable model for understanding human intentions and behavior lump other people together according to their own criteria, even though those people can -- and often do -- make their own decisions according to completely different criteria. People do not see strangers as having common interests or values simply because a third set of strangers have reduced them to data points that fall into the same bar on a narrowly tailored histogram.
When put to the test, these class theories consistently fail to predict actual human behavior, and people with normative attachements to the theories then to hand-wave away these discrepancies: "false consciousness", "voting against their interests", etc.; these notions are layers of epicycles meant to sustain a speculative theory in the face of falsifying evidence.
Much better to do away with a priori class theories, and just analyze what actual people are actually saying and doing.
However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
Also class struggle is not about an a priori theory. If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too. You can see for instance that billionaires think and act in a specific way, which is widely different than, and against against the interests of, a common working person. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between a boss and their worker. You can observe this and they will actually say this if you ask them.
Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed. A slave is obeying his master because it’s the best option for him under that circumstances. Maybe he’s not even aware of the possibility of other options. He may even say that his master is a very good individual and he’s proud to be his slave. None of these means that there is no conflict between those two classes, nor there are no classes.
Of course there's a literature on it. Tribalism is one of humanity's most primitive traits. Being principled, reasoning, and being fair are the unusual things that develop and are developed by the most advanced civilisations. Just having different prices in shops based on who you are is normal. Having a set price for every customer is the advanced version, and less common.
No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding.
The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world.
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis?
> Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks.
> If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too.
If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs.
> Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed.
Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis.
People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available.
Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests.
In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.
You can, you just assert that everyone is a worker and a capitalist simultaneously and that these individual components exist independent of their classification and the assortment of people into groups of classes and that what you call class is just the mundane reflection of some of those components outweighing other components.
When I suggest a tax on holding cash, hardline communists will argue along this insane line of thinking "this will impact workers the most because they are holding most of their net worth in cash". Ah yes, the capitalist worker, fighting for his capitalist interests. Amazing. What was the class struggle about again? Blaming others and absolving yourself of your own responsibility to fix this mess of an economy? Great, you are the problem!
Any remotely sane person siding with workers would realize that workers have an asset known as their own body including the associated lifespan of that body and this is an asset that is producing a future income over time. This asset is illiquid and completely exempt from a money based tax, but if you were to introduce a true wealth tax on all physical capital, the government would not be in the wrong if it assessed the "net worth" of your body and taxed you accordingly. So the ideology of taxing property directly is inherently a tax on labor and therefore not much different from a capitalist taking a cut from your labor. Meanwhile the tax on holding money is purely a tax on a passthrough asset that nobody should hold significant quantities of to begin with. In a hypothetically perfectly optimized society, nobody pays that tax because the transient money supply is zero, that's very different from a tax that grows indefinitely.
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 exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. 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?
I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
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 fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.
And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?
> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.
I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.
Don't we at the very least want to know who might, for whatever reason, not be able to support themselves day to day? So they don't like starve in their homes? Is there at least an answer for that? An aggregate which might past muster?
To abstract all of this into some generalized notion of "class struggle" that presumes that that "workers" as a category are at all times locked into a zero-sum struggle against all "bosses" is not just empirically false, but is actually a notion that has at times been calcified into a dogma used to justify incredibly destructive and oppressive behavior.
The prioritization of categories over human beings in the attribution of moral agency is a profound error.
EDIT since I can’t reply:
It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc.
So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent.
I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
Cause we’ve never seen capital holders collude to keep wages down. Certainly never in the technology industry. It’s just pure competition as nature intended.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I'm clearly talking about an attitude that basically all capital owners are in secret cahoots with each other to destroy their sworn enemy: workers. Aka, the class war they don't want you to believe is happening.
It's all nonsense.
You do have bad actors amongst labor but everytime labor tries to coordinate together the union crushing apparatus comes out so you don’t tend to see as much coordinated bad activity.
And with AI we’re not seeing companies chomping at the bit to make all their employees more productive left and right, we’re seeing them chomping at the bit to see how many employees they can cut
You denialists have one favorite go-to rebuttal, don't you?
It's really, really helpful. So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this. I don't think you need this synthetic org setup to get exec help at a small level. It really helped me with fundraising, incorporation, compliance, and just keeping me on track.
Based on what? How do you judge if those are the right things to work on? As a founder, your number 1 priority is essentially to manage that the company works towards the right thing, but it sounds like to me you're outsourcing that part to a LLM? How do you know what the "right track" is when the track is just what the LLM outlined for you?
This is the "unknown unknowns" problem. It sounds like the agent is a reasonably good source of obvious-in-hindsight problems that a experienced founder would have experienced, but a new founder wouldn't easily guess at.
> judge if these are the right things
This problem exists no matter where you get the things from.
As a mundane example, I had an email from my wife about a kid's swimming party she'd RSVP'd to.
My agenda that morning reminded me to pack, inter alia, sunblock and towels for my new car's seats. So it inferred sunblock from the party mention, and towels from the party mention alongside emails talking about my new car (and some "knowledge" that people take more care to protect new cars vs old cars).
Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about
Nah. When I talk about CEOs I usually mean founders-turned-CEO because those are the types I've personally known and shared space with. Remember, this is HN.
Most of those guys are megalomaniacs, clueless, or clueless megalomaniacs.
The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive, but since it was an executive in a position of making decisions that damaged or ended the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, they would give him a pass (and directions to other executives/billionaires).
And he pleaded guilty. There’s nothing “alleged” about this conversation, despite feelings about any other aspects of it.
Edit since I can’t reply: if “murderer” means someone who takes actions that have nth-order effects of someone dying, with no reasonable or discernible limit on n, then we’re all murderers and the term means nothing.
Oh wait, he didn't break any laws? Hmm...well, fuck the idea of having a legal system I guess, let's just cheer every vigilante who decides to murder people in the street based on their own feelings. I'm sure that'll work out well.
???
This is the same talk that saw people turn a blind eye to all the horror in history. You invent a fake story that casts someone (Jews in Nazi Germany, the middle class in Soviet Russia, whatever it is) as worthy of death, and then you do everything you can to excuse the behaviour of their murderers.
* Lack of focus and discipline: Good founder, huckster, good at sales but won't scale with the business when it needs to start focussing.
* Fearful and nervous: Might start a business but doesn't want to make the wrong decision and so stops the business from growing due to decisions not being made when they need making.
* Not a founder but got the role somewhere once, lacks genuine transferable skills. Might work OK in another business but more than likely just riding the existing success/failure of the new business and leaves after 1-2 years to "face a new challenge".
* The rarest of all. Has all the relevant skills, creative, outgoing, mission focused and makes hard decisions efficiently. Will do well in whatever business they are in but might not be very popular!
CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).
If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.
It was almost like parody:
- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".
- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.
- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.
- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.
This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.
Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.
In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.
And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.
Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.
Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.
I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.
I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.
Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.
In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.
Whereas no one on the set of e.g. Suits has ever had contact with the legal system
Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.
When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.
Bit like if hn was convinced white cats catch mice better than black ones. Point out that this makes no sense wouldn’t be a fallacy, even if it involves aggregating opinions from people with their own views on cats
But in reality it must be a hugely difficult job. I can’t imagine dealing with so many humans myself.
The wine-and-dine sales prospects will last until agents control purse strings.
At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day.
Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great.
But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe
People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.
This caricature that’s occurring could also be thanks to all the horrible CEOs being so visible to everyone.
One of my friend’s medium-size billion dollar-ish company with almost a thousand employees is run by a CEO who is currently in AI psychosis and has started regularly submitting pull requests and demanding they get reviewed as if he’s a member of the development team. He basically comes in with a wrecking ball to carefully planned work with his own daily inspirations that he demands teams far down the totem pole drop everything to work on.
This isn’t an animal that has never been seen, this is a real person that is acting a real fool and negatively impacting my real friend.
We have all been fed this narrative that CEO is the most demanding job in the corporate ladder. How does this CEO have time to be submitting pull requests?
Then you have people like Elon Musk who demonstrate categorically that it’s actually possible to be the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies at once. The fact that this is possible at all smashes the facade of the “impossibly busy CEO.”
Look at how many CEOs have other corporate engagements outside of their primary CEO job. How does Tim Cook have time to be a board member of Nike? How does Satya Nadella have time to be on the board of Starbucks and the University of Chicago?
Logically, if the CEO is such a rigorous job with grueling hours you shouldn’t be physically able to do it at two companies, be a board member for completely unrelated businesses, or run a philanthropic foundation on the side in your spare time.
Then we move on to the "rich guy toys."
How does Mark Zuckerberg have the time to utilize a $300 million yacht? If he's so busy why doesn't he just charter one on the rare occasion he has a week off? Isn't a boat a horrible place to be when you're a busy CEO who needs to constantly travel to company sites, industry and government engagements, and be in close communication with company leaders? Keep in mind, he has owned large scale yachts long before Starlink was a thing.
This is the kind of stuff the CEO of the largest social media company in the world has time for: multiple months of vacationing on his yacht with transponders turned off.
> His $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, has been sailing in stealth mode for the last three months, with its AIS (Automatic Identification System) turned off throughout the European holiday. That’s more than 90 days where the 388 feet long vessel is sailing blind in the busy waters of the Mediterranean.
> Zuckerberg is thoroughly enjoying his time on the newly acquired $300 million luxury vessel. Back in May, the billionaire celebrated his 40th birthday by flying to Panama on his private jet to board the Feadship-built megayacht. A month later, the Meta boss whisked his entire family away on Launchpad on a luxurious cruise to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, which also coincided with Father’s Day.
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-sailing...
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superya...
[0] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a63431790/...
So that would be like if I took 6 work weeks weeks off per year to work full time at some other company.
The article I linked specifically mentioned that private company boards demand less time than public company boards, around 200 hours, roughly 25 work days.
Any of these figures is pretty close to my entire yearly PTO allocation as an individual contributor.
Nike consistently has 5 board meetings per year, so Tim Cook is taking time out of running the second most valuable company in the world to do that, for some reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146
No single human could design a rocket to go to the moon or keep all Wallmart stores supplied on a daily basis. Moreover when something like the CEO or US president changes, the policies and actions change a bit but the majority actually stays the same. This is collective intelligence embodied in the organization and its institutional memory. This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.
Our cells and neurons act based on local chemical gradients and electrical signals and we wouldn't call any single one of those particularly intelligent. Yet collectively they produce human intelligence and even what we call consciousness!
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood. That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[2] https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/milton-friedman-the-fa...
You can maximize profits whilst destroying value btw.
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
“ and even what we call consciousness!”
This misunderstands the point of the so-called Chinese room thought experiment. You want to conclude that consciousness is functional, but you cite a thought experiment which argues it is not, and then assert the thought experiment is wrong because it disagrees with your preconceived notion of consciousness.
My basic argument is that human *intelligence* (and understanding - I consider understanding as part of intelligence and consciousness separately but I can see how many might group understanding with consciousness and leave intelligence on its own) is a form of collective intelligence. Individual neurons acting based on local chemical and electrical signals collectively produce behaviour that we call intelligent, i.e. it can solve problems, respond to questions, etc ... . A particular configuration of neurons acting together I will call a particular software or algorithm (I understand that separating the software from the neural substrate in that way is part of what's in dispute, particularly by Searle, but that's my belief and what I feel is required to make the mapping to the Chinese Room argument). The Chinese Room thought experiment then is trying to refute Strong AI by arguing that the person in the Chinese Room has no understanding of the exchange with the outside world because they are just manipulating symbols incomprehensible to them. I agree that the person has no understanding. That person on their own would not be able to string together a sensible reply without the instruction cards. However another person with the same instruction cards, i.e. algorithm, would be able to reply sensibly, pass a Chinese Turing test, etc ..., thus demonstrating that the intelligence/understanding resides in the algorithm. The person is just an execution substrate. The mistake in the Chinese Room argument is identifying the locus of understanding in the person, which imho is failure of imagination. It's akin to saying that humans can have no understanding because each individual neuron has no understanding of our actions, something which the existence proof of human intelligence refutes.
What then of consciousness? Here I also have some beliefs which I'm happy to write down but in my assessment they're less substantiated so make of them what you will. I saw some things by Joscha Bach recently and I liked what he said about agents and consciousness as a form self-recognition of the agent as an entity in the environment and predictive modeling of future states of that entity in order to achieve the agents goals and realise some form of agency. I don't know where neuroscience and cognitive science stand on this but made sense to me as a sensible model of consciousness. Therefore I would even go so far as to say that I believe that entities such as the United States of America (and any country or institution really) are probably conscious in some form, because they are aware of themselves, model themselves, and try to project their agency in the environment that they find themselves in. We are not directly aware of this because we are like single neurons in our brain and this happens at a scale much larger than us. Moreover I suspect that as you go up each rung on the emergence ladder, the temporal scale of the phenomena gets an order slower as that level is composed of the interactions at the level below it. So the speed of interactions of our neurons is an order faster than our conscious processes and similarly the emergent bodies and institutions that we form part of act an order slower so their processes are more difficult for us to perceive.
Schematically then my beliefs organise roughly as follows:
- intelligence = algorithm: think neural network weights you can download of HuggingFace
- consciousness = self-aware world model + state: I speculate that the same NN world model weights running with separate state would perceive themselves as separate entities
Would love to hear some thoughts on this!
Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway
I think organizations' intelligence can only be called superhuman if you ascribe them their own inscrutable goals, different from what people want their goals to be.
But why would you do that?
It's true that a lot of the debate about AI alignment - the good parts, anyway - also apply to human institutions.
Because that is what actually gets pursued. The set of effective goals an organization is distinctly different from those of any of the individuals in that organization.
The set of things an organization ends up doing may be distinctly different from those of the individuals, but that does in no way oblige us to ascribe agency to the organization on its own.
What’s the primary goal of any for profit business? To survive for eternity - going concern in perpetuity that is hopefully very valuable.
These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.
The entire financial system is a form of artificial intelligence. We just never framed it that way.
It only shocks humans now because they a) never thought about it - it was in the background b) it’s in your face and you can play with it
It's more akin to an ecosystem to me. In nature we also have ecosystems organising and reusing resources but I would only ascribe intelligence to living organisms pursuing individual goals with agency.
Haven't thought too hard about the distinction though so happy to be shown a better principle.
But AGI does something additional: It decreases cost for it and increases speed.
Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.
Not really. If they did, markets would be more stable. Look at the prices of commodities such as copper. Prices swing up and own by as much as 3x, despite both supply and demand not changing much. That's the problem. If supply and demand have a lot of inertia, and thus lag, the feedback loop becomes unstable. This is basic control theory. Hedging with derivatives was supposed to add stability, but doesn't work very well for that purpose.
The opposite of a market solving a resource allocation problem is the command economy, where some (small) group people are tasked with decisions like how much copper to actually produce. Instead of price swings, you get shortages.
In any case, the point in my parent comment is that crowd intelligence solves some problems that cannot be easily solved by human intelligence (command economy vs free markets). But i would not call crowd intelligence a super intelligence.
Then why do we still have homeless and jobless?
Organisations pursue goals with agency and there is even Darwinian competition between them in many cases.
Yeah, wasn't claiming that it was particularly novel or divine insight, otherwise I might have tried to publish a paper about it. I was just recounting my experience on this matter.
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
That's a feature, not a bug. CEOs should be focusing on the key goals of the business at a high level.
Having an inexhaustible AI CEO that can pay attention to every little thing in the company could easily turn into a micromanagement nightmare.
"I noticed your key pressed were down 27% last week and your agents sat idle 3 nights in a row. And honestly? The thing to hold on to is that it's not a small thing, it's a load-bearing reduction in your output. Let's try to minimize the blast radius with some belt-and-suspenders productivity tips from the bullet point list below:"
The expression makes sense (a not dissimilar "trickle down" got accepted...). But used like in the text above, "the blast radius of your reduced productivity", it better be satire.
This sounds cool, will start using it. Thanks!
Imagine a manager who knows that company needs in a long term support person even if it's not busy at the moment. Because AI has data of historical precedents and actual calculations. And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees, actual humans who perform the actual work and who benefit from good CEO decisions and most importantly the AI CEO which does not gave to be paid gazilion dolars just to burn the company to the ground and leave with golden parachute. I think there is a good insight that AI has very high bandwidth, that human management does not have, no more 2 week meeting marathons just to get everyone on same page and to get all the inputs.
You’re just describing a company owned by employees who manage themselves. The AI isn’r relevant to your story other than being a proxy and note keeping apparatus for them.
But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
There is no such thing as common sense without shared assumptions. So if those shared assumptions are incorrect or not given at all the output of the models will be nonsensical. In order to truly act human there is a need to experience humanity from the first person.
This is why I think technology will get more and more invasive. Meta glasses now, personal agent devices later and neural implants after that with data sharing enabled.
So the responses will be even more incoherent than Opus 5?
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
This is actually my #1 problem with frontier LLMs. They are plenty smart, but they have no true long term memory, and their context window is not nearly enough for a complex system like a corporation. When my project gets big enough and I'm using a lot of /compact, the LLMs always have the same failure point: they fail to pay attention to something.
When they figure this out, I think it's going to be a very, very big moment.
I’m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero
I hope legislation is never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation or become it's legal director. With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it's bots all the way down.
Corporations already exist to limit liability and accountability. This would be an extension of their current purpose not some weird deviation from.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ai-run-companies-are-comin...
It would be useless, given that you can just install a human controller signing (or not) decisions from others: the human remains responsible.
If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt
I’m working through an exploration of how AI will change the Coasean idea of “The Firm” on my site https://chainofbranches.com/conversations/8/branches/59/
Prompts like: you are an activist in XYZ, you wrote this book. Not tell us if this decision is ethical, and if you approve it.
Or running entire HR department in AI...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
Well, that's the final level of AI.
https://firstmovers.ai/agi-levels/
You're probably totally innocent, but this comes across as being AI-written, especially in the context of an AI problem and when your response is pro-AI. For the next 3-12 months (maybe more, we'll see), I suspect you'll have a lot more success if you shy away from those speech patterns.
It's also triggering me. Wait, genuinely triggering me.
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=genuinely&date=all&geo=W...
AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.
It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.
This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)
It's either AI-assisted or someone desperatelly trying to impress "unknown people" with their non-existent intellect.
I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.
Huh. Never would have guessed it, in a million years...
To be fair, "Famous person accused of being an AI," was on my bingo card. It was inevitable for this kind of embarrassing mistake to happen.
By pure luck I even landed on a comment that uses that same word with a similar sentiment, except back then he wrote it as a full non-punchy sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414288
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25948632
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862016
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11943786
Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point.
The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
For that type of content YT is essentially completely ruined if you didn't already follow the good ones because finding them in the absolute sea of dross has become way more difficult.
Cool. Standard local interest story.
Then, it cut to a photo montage, with “her” voice, continuing the story.
Except it was AI. It wasn’t especially successful. You could hear the “tics” from the AI.
At this point it's super annoying for me to have my "AI wrote this" alarm trigger at my own language, as I'm writing...
Random Internet people are not impressed.
Otherwise, they mean nothing.
Previously, most people would save their effort for things that actually mattered. Take away the effort and this is what you get.
It's long READMEs with 3 punchlines per paragraph for a project best described has "I found these 4 thingies, all of them had compromises, so I told Claude: merge the 4, no compromises!"
And every issue, every PR you open, about every small improvement or new feature, is the same.
Smart people want others to understand them.
In early days of Internet, it was a domain of smart people. And native English speakers have no problem communicating with people from Ex-Comecon countries with vey little English knowledge.
Unfortunately you can't get your em dash back, ever. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Long live the em-dash. Or en-dash surrounded by spaces if you prefer UK style (which I do).
I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were dismissed. Hence the somewhat out of character rhetoric.
We have organizations of people for the usual reasons. Scale. Specialization. Robustness against failure and errors. All those wins apply to structured groups of LLMs. So this has a reasonable chance of being useful. It's expensive at the moment, but probably cheaper than the management team it may replace.
For some reason, this idea seems to upset people. Unclear why. Comments?
More likely, they're all wrong on this accusation. A bit concerning to see how many of them are throwing out a false positive like this. Makes me wonder how many of them are falling for actual AI traps in the real world. :)
There have been some successful attempts to do science like this (https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario). Denario generated 1k+ "solutions" on its way to winning the FAIR Universe challenge, and they all had to be fed through a fitness function of some kind to assess them. It also got stuck on a local maximum and had to be kicked in the ass by a human to get it off that.
When writing software, that fitness function is relatively closed (when I run it, does it do what I want?). With something as open-ended as managing a business... might as well roll dice, IMO.
My belief is that 20's LLMs have a lot in common with 90's GAs: the more clearly we can define "success" for a given task (the fitness function) the more successful they can be. Open-ended problems are somewhat beyond them right now, and, I suspect, forever.
(The comment that's currently at the top of the discussion, about making an "AI Boss" that remembered everything about the company, and fed the user three tasks a day? That's not an AI Boss, that's an AI Assistant with different framing.)
I actually upvoted your post. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I was interested to see more discussion about it, and that felt worthy of an upvote.
As for the reaction against the idea, I see it from two angles. Is the standard corporate hierarchy / architecture really the optimal organization principle for AI? Or is that just a skeuomorphism to make this project seem more serious than it really is? Maybe Yegge did us a favor by mapping to Mayors & Polecats, forcing people to question if it really is the correct organizational hierarchy?
The other angle is heresy here - HN is full of employees now. There is little incentive for employees to be interested in what a C-suite does, and we see that with the comments about CEOs needing to be six foot and walk impressively. Employees have no interest in AI organization principles that optimize them away and highlights their obsolescence. I am surprised there hasn't been more discussion about how this specific project optimizes away the C-suite humans instead - I would have thought that could have had some appeal to employees, at least until those people realized it makes employees a swarm that works for AI leadership.
As for AI organization, the organizational mapping needs to be productive, not affectation or cargo-culting. That's not peripheral — that's load-bearing. Especially in a corporation model, you can find the organization layers only create busywork with lots of unnecessary middle managers. You don't want your AI C-suite swarm burning tokens on endless meetings about what should be in the upcoming meeting... especially not at Fable API pricing.
> <totally vague statement>. This matters.
Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it.
The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently.
> banning speech patterns
AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway.
I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.
The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.
At least that's my prediction.
Also sometimes known as 'The Gripping Hand'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand
The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication.
So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
(Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)
The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test
Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else
My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but want to ensure continuity beyond my ability or interest to do the labor myself. (Sometimes this is by my wish; sometimes by the wish of consumers of my service.)
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but not want to expose my entire net worth to the financial obligations of the company.
There are plenty of cases where a single person company makes good sense.
This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It also presupposes that success is zero sum and winner takes all, which isn't always the case (example: when you're building out a new market segment, it can be beneficial to have competitors that are also building it out).
It’s the premise of the thought experiment: to be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve a competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment
I suppose you can claim that a profit can still be generated by offering a holistically worse service/product with no single advantage than a competitor because markets are not efficient, though this may be short lived
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune?
There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for strategic business advice, they tend to converge toward what is popular and trendy rather than necessarily what is best for the particular situation. They called this "trendslop," and described the response as,
"On strategy, LLMs might be more akin to a freshly minted MBA or junior consultant, parroting what's popular rather than what's right for a particular situation."
I really hope this idea works but just thought I'd share some of the research out there. https://archive.is/OPObK/again?url=https://hbr.org/2026/03/r...
From observation of having worked at 7-8 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.
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.
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
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.
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
Well, so do most CEOs.
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
This is not a competitive advantage
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/oklahomacity/press-release...
I can totally see this blame being shifted to AI in a "nobody got fired for choosing IBM" way.
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
At least the good ones do.
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours.
This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back.
I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip.
CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
The people who make the rules (by brainwashing the population through a trillion dollar advertising industry what would make Pravda blush) only want to help themselves. As long as they have enough toys to prevent a French Revolution or for other people to take their wealth, they’re happy.
200 years ago, even 1000 years ago, the rich had to live in the same towns as the masses so they did actually put effort into keeping them nice. Building amenities, providing jobs, etc.
They don’t have to do that now. Power extends far beyond a 20 mile radius. They don’t have to go anywhere near the people.
Of course, if those max amounts of things have few consumers because most people are just too poor to afford them, that'd make companies (or the agents that run companies) think twice too. At some point these AI agents might work together to come up with an economic system to make it possible for society to afford their products so they could further grow.
I think a resource consumption based tax model extends very neatly to a UBI model. One could think of as: "this is the basic resource consumption we allow each person" and it automatically generates demand for basic services everyone should be able to afford with their share of resources, while keeping a free market and allowing an economy on top with extra resources. Standard money could still be the means for value exchange, just taxing works differently.
We need UBI. Taxes are still there anyway, company income/profit tax, VAT, and maybe we can have other taxes too for automatically-generate income, same as with investments/dividend/gambling tax and stuff.
Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.
This is morbidly unrealistic.
I never saw LLMs coming.
Only failure is actionable, in which case said managers will make a good effort to shift blame.
So if your boss is an idiot and an a-hole, and you have to work twice as hard because of it, you are enabling the bad working conditions he's subjecting you to.
I didn't realize this until far too late.
But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.
MBAs are just components, and the cost of that component just went down.
Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?
So the only potential heat is boredom.
See you can add anything there and the sentence will make sense.
I will never vote for an AI system to actually make laws lol wtf are you even saying
Let me guess, it just happens that the role that you work in is amongst the only that actually provide value, and everything else is just waste.
Developers are among some of the least self-aware people ever, I swear. And I say this as a developer. The God complex instilled in techies in the ‘00s and ‘10s is unrivalled and I’m really enjoying seeing some of you being taken down a peg.
CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
Some work is 24/7 basically, when you have to keep business afloat there are no sick days or worse days. Your brain is 24/7 preoccupied with the work.
Meanwhile you walk out after 8 hours and stop caring at all because - someone else does
Someone else grinds to provide you with employment so there is work at all and the company keeps sailing.
I am sure you guys are smart, adults. stop being so childish and immature. You are better than that
Meanwhile most companies prohibit side jobs for us plebians (sorry, "non-executives".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
or, more probably I have used a fallacy to analogize the wrong fallacy :)
> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
A constant push and pull between leaders and the led is the fundamental. Criticism in both directions is necessary and healthy, and at different times both correct and misplaced.
There have been great leaders and awful ones. Acting as if all leaders are proven and deserving is as asinine as naming all CEOs as useless.
Right now we are at a point where CEOs are biased towards being quite anti worker and too easily rewarded. It's not surprising the cliches against them come out.
Last 5-6 years: COVID surge in HN brings in more people
Last 3-4 years: General rise in AI topics which have broad appeal and brought in a lot of people
Last 2-3 years: More overtly political discourse on HN bringing in more people
Last 1-2 years: Bots start coming in, some are very obvious, but they have gotten better and better to the point its hard to tell anymore.
Last year: Sharp rise in shallow redditor-style comments, especially in cultural/political discussions comments that are snarky but contribute little to discussion outside of affirmations like "Laws are for poor people"
> Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks?... I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
I'm sure many CEOs are bozos who can be replaced by a statistical averaging and guessing machine. But this skill of saying "it's time for us to dramatically change course because the music has stopped" seems to me very contrary to the current LLM paradigm. RL makes the chatbot agreeable ('aligned'). But changing course is inherently disagreeable. It makes enemies and people are going to try to talk you out of it at every turn. I think we'll need a new idea of what LLMs are for, and how to train them, before they can do that. (Much easier to mimic and therefore replace a Ballmer than a Nadella, in other words.)
https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa...
“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”
such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights
Other gem from my new CFO:
“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”
And my new C(3-)PO just told me
“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
It looks like most of the work of the package is reactive -- monitoring external things and responding. It's not proactive just because a person didn't dial it up.
But, here's the thing -- this can likely replace many executives right now, at least those who are reactive managers. I'm in full support -- automate those things if you can.
AI is coming for judgment jobs. It seems it's turtles all the way down.
The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal
In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more
I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
A warning: Don't burn Chrome.
BTW: not all predictions from Neuromancer are there yet...
At this stage, this seems to be a demo, albeit an interesting one. I find the concept still very intriguing, as it is exactly the thing that attacks white collar functions in administrative and executive tasks sets. I need to give it a spin.
The board might have to take on a more active role in instructing the CEO, just as someone managing an LLM now has to be careful how they prompt it.
God forbid the board should make to do more than show up for a few general meetings and collect a fat cheque.
Organizations/Biz requirements (be it scope, money, HR, etc) changes depending on the size thereof.
This assumes that whatever your biz is, it's at Google level. It's too much. Sometimes you need just few employees (few agents) to get the things done.
This app will overcomplicate flows just like in real life. The only lesson I will take from app is how SenteLab created the service, and why (<- so you know when to use this or not)
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
Creating an AI executive suite can bring some skills to the table, but it doesn't solve the authority question. I'm curious how this would work in practice...
What happens if the AI decides it wants to commit funds - does it have authority? What if it wants to change direction? What if it wants to fire a developer?
That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.
https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260728013424/https://overpaid....
I always cringe when I read this kind of thing, even if it might be true on some level.
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.
Ah - never ? Because corpo ladder is rigged? Ok, thats what I thought.
We glamorize execs but at the end of the day if you watch their careers they have plenty of failures (usually) and generally fail upwards. I’ve known some amazing CTOs and VPs of engineering and they’ve brought more to the table but a lot of what the executive team does is looking at the currents in the industry and trying to make educated guesses about where things are going. Yes more than that but this is a news.y comment.
I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?
I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .
Prove it.
> be a leader
There are a lot of bad "leaders" out there running Fortune 500s, fwiw.
If you just want a sociopath with faux accountability that's not very difficult, dime a dozen.
I've been a founder, CEO, and combat leader under fire in Iraq.
> Or is it too hard for you?
I guess, clearly, it wasn't. Have you ever lead men in combat when death is real and you are right there as the tip of the spear, with some of the smartest and most high level athletes in the world?
A lot of fortune 500 CEOs are nepo or network hires to grease wheels and laws, but even then, it's not necessary merit or performance based. There are some good ones, but there are more bad ones than good. All will write books on "leadership"!
A lot of you calling things "leadership" in large companies can be done with fairly basic calculations and you don't even need a high functioning sociopath to take the blame. That doesn't mean you don't have a board judging performance.
Also a lot of you are taking things very personal, thinking most of these comments and complaints are talking about some CEO of a 5 or 500 person company, but what many of us are talking about are companies with 50k-100k employees or more (then there's Amazon with over a million).
But yeah...
> "Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly”
Take your own advice.
I'll see you on the front lines.
AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere".
Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.
I guess that would be at least a nice bang to let democracy finally die. Let's hope that we never see that happening.
___
To expand on that:
I believe that these thoughts are so incredibly harmful to humanity itself, (and, more importantly, I believe that the people in power believe that too,) that we'd be seeing pushback against this.
Maximum pushback, because what the pushback would be defending would be - as said - humanity itself.
Said pushback would be bypassing democracy, because there is no way of arguing with these crazy thoughts. Which would said a precedent, because why stop there.
Which, again, makes me believe that this is some sort of psyop, because I refuse to think that the people on here would really be as blind to the systemic implications of their brainfarts.
___
FWIW, a ruling class worth their net worth would go for the less draconian thing of simply taking away your internet access and forcing you to touch grass.
One that is.. uh.. less signed up on the whole "all people are equal and worth saving" would line up.. idk.. 100 people with these horribly bad-for-humanity ideas and shoot them in the head live on stream or something.
The interesting twist here is that LLM rulers might be more biased towards doing option B, as the statistical probabilities of words cannot _feel_ the chemical hormone cocktail invoked by the mental image of that.
Be careful what you wish for.
The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.
The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.
Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.
Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.
Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.
The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing.
No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
This is the best project ever.
I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)
Which is not bad in itself, but I wish there was a way to balance this out.
Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.
This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).
How? If the bias is in the dataset itself, then it'll be in the LLM decision also, right?
Asking models about politically sensitive events differ WILDLY based on the country that produced that AI.
I am talking about these biased a human manager or executive will most certainly have. We have all seen it.
I don't see either of those being able to be done by an AI agent.
* Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default.
* Having courage to do the correct, obvious thing even when your team or investors don't think it's the right call. (This might be firing someone everyone likes but who's role is no longer needed, it might be changing strategies away from the product everyone just spent 6 months on, etc. etc. the list goes on). -> Ben Horowitz has called this kind of decision basically the entire value of a CEO. This is also EXACTLY where today's LLMs keep getting worse and worse. They are utterly spineless.
* Having unique skills and credibility to build a team -> This can come from many sources (track record, vision, charisma, specific achievements, network, etc.) , but people need to want to join YOUR team, not someone else's. They have to believe that YOU are going to win against the market. There is no way you're going to have an edge by using a commercially available AI API with an open source harness at the helm. That is just so utterly uncompelling to top candidates.
* Fundraising -> On the surface, very ammenable to AI, but again, as an investor, would you seriously invest in a CEO that is literally replicatable by any other company?
The value I can see for something like this is a human to get a "2nd pair of eyes". But humans have tons of advisors already and generally speaking, getting takes on what you should do as CEO is not the hard part. It's seeing through the fog of war, finding clarity, and then implementing that clarity across the org, which is surprisingly hard.
VCs likely won't demand that you be replaced with a claude subscription. But shareholders might wonder why they should approve a fat package for a meatbag. Private equity, picking over dinosaurs, won't hesitate.
Lindy Fiorina hacking up HP? That job is now mechanised.
Most human CEOs are disqualified then. Whenever I join a company these days, they stress how important the company's values are, and they are somehow basically the same as every other company.
This will be epic.
We've been rightfully pissed at companies doing unethical things and getting away with it, as there is simply nothing you can hurt them with.
Why is HN fantasizing about making the companies even less hurtable? Are people here insane? Otoh, a lot of those accounts are just a few months old, so.. welp. Nice psyop we got here.
Revenge of the nerds.
I have a Claude Pro account.
Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!
The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.
No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.
The CEO is ultimately an employee of the board, and managing the CEO with respect to the board's oversight and interest is a somewhat adversarial challenge.
However, the AI CEO's intentions are fully transparent to the board and entirely pliable to the board's demands. The AI CEO also offers the board the opportunity to retain significant equity shares that materially impact their wealth - in this way AI executives stand to be an even more tantalizing target than fixed labor costs.
Of course, this presumes LLMs will become reliable enough for this, which doesn't seem likely.
And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...
But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
- A CxO continues to get paid if they accidentally make a bad business decision that needs to be fixed, even if it costs the business money to fix it.
If you want a model where employees have to give up compensation for their mistakes, it would affect low ranking employees far more harshly than it would affect executives.
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
But I do not like the idea that an AI like this could end up ranking higher than human beings in an org chart. That is still pretty dystopian.
-The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
:-)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Won%27t_Get_Fooled_Again)
Let's replace these motherfuckers.
Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.
If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
No. Oh my god no.
This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed.
Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but the jump to "all are like this" is crazy, and, more importantly, anti-intellectual.
While Proxy AI [0] is not open source, it is free, it is built from pure garage energy, and we are having our summer sale right now. 20% off for HN users.
[0]: https://getproxyai.com/
Just like in Iain Banks's scifi (although those AIs are actually intelligent -- I don't think you need that for a CEO).