If AI ends up running companies better than people, won’t shareholders demand the switch? A board isn’t paying a CEO $20 million a year for tradition, they’re paying for results. If an AI can do the job cheaper and get better returns, investors will force it.
And since corporations are already treated as “people” under the law, replacing a human CEO with an AI isn’t just swapping a worker for a machine, it’s one “person” handing control to another.
That means CEOs would eventually have to replace themselves, not because they want to, but because the system leaves them no choice. And AI would be considered a “person” under the law.
Sadly don’t think this is going to happen. A good CEO doesn’t make calculated decisions based on facts and judge risk against profit. If he did, he would, at best, be a normal CEO. Who wants that? No, a truly great CEO does exactly what a truly bad CEO does; he takes risks that aren’t proportional to the reward (and gets lucky)!
This is the only way to beat the game, just like with investments or roulette. There are no rich great roulette players going by the odds. Only lucky.
Sure, with CEOs, this is on the aggregate. I’m sure there is a genius here and a Renaissance man there… But on the whole, best advice is “get risky and get lucky”. Try it out. I highly recommend it. No one remembers a loser. And the story continues.
> company gets super invested in AI.
> replaces CEO with AI.
> AI does AI stuff, hallucinaties, calls for something inefficient and illegal.
> 4 trillion investor dollars go up in flames.
> company goes under, taking AI hype market down with itAnd nothing of value will be lost.
If AI ends up running companies better than people
Okay, important context there. The current AI bubble will burst sooner or later. So, this is hypothetical future AGI.
Yes, if the process of human labour becoming redundant continues uninterrupted, it’s highly likely, although since CEOs make their money from the intangible asset of having connections more than the actual work they’ll be one of the last to go.
But, it won’t continue uninterrupted. We’re talking about rapidly transitioning to an entirely different kind of economy, and we should expect it will be similarly destabilising as it was to hunter gatherer societies that suddenly encountered industrial technology.
If humans are still in control, and you still have an entire top 10% of the population with significant equity holdings, there’s not going to be much strategy to the initial stages. Front line workers will get laid off catastrophically, basically, and no new work will be forthcoming. The next step will be a political reaction. If some kind of make-work program is what comes out of it, human managers will still find a place in it. If it’s basic income, probably not. (And if there’s not some kind of restriction on the top end of wealth, as well, you’re at risk of creating a new ruling elite with an incentive to kill everyone else off, but that’s actually a digression from the question)
When it comes to the longer term, I find inspiration in a blog post I read recently. Capital holdings will eventually become meaningless compared to rights to natural factors. If military logic works at all the same way, and there’s ever any kind of war, land will once again be supreme among them. There weren’t really CEOs in feudalism, and even if we manage not to regress to autocracy there probably won’t be a place for them.
Companies never outsourced the CEO position to countries which traditionally have lower CRO salaries but plenty of competency (e.g. Japan), so they won’t do this either. It’s because CEOs are controlled by boards, and the boards are made up of CEOs from other companies. They have a vested interest in human CEOs with inflated salaries.
Would be cool & funny if they did.
That would free up a whole shitload of money for the citizens! /s
That will be a whole shitload of money for the shareholders
I could imagine a world where whole virtual organizations could be spun up, and they can just run in the background creating whole products, marketing them, and doing customer support, etc.
Right now the technology doesn’t seem there yet, but it has been rapidly improving, so we’ll see.
I could definitely see rich CEOs funding the creation of a “celebrity” bot that answers questions the way they do. Maybe with their likeness and voice, so they can keep running companies from beyond the grave. Throw it in one of those humanoid robots and they can keep preaching the company mission until the sun burns out.
What a nightmare.
Check out the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, that thing is part of the plot.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out!
Y’all are all missing the real answer. CEOs have class solidarity with shareholders. Think about about how they all reacted to the death of the United health care CEO. They’ll never get rid of them because they’re one of them. Rich people all have a keen awareness of class consciousness and have great loyalty to one another.
Us? We’re expendable. They want to replace us with machines that can’t ask for anything and don’t have rights. But they’ll never get rid of one of their own. Think about how few CEOs get fired no matter how poor of a job they do.
P.S. Their high pay being because of risk is a myth. Ever heard of a thing called the golden parachute? CEOs never pay for their failures. In fact when they run a company into the ground, they’re usually the ones that receive the biggest payouts. Not the employees.
Loyalty lasts right up until the math says otherwise.
One must include social capital in the math
The math has never made sense for CEOs
Wouldn’t they just remove the CEO from their role and they would just become another rich shareholder?
Several years ago I read an article that went in to great detail on how LLMs are perfectly poised to replace C-levels in corporations. I went on to talk about how they by nature of design essentially do the that exact thing off the bat, take large amounts of data and make strategic decisions based on that data.
I wish I could find it to back this up, but regardless ever since then, I’ve been waiting for this watershed moment to hit across the board…
They… don’t make strategic decisions… That’s part of why we hate them no? And we lambast AI proponents because they pretend they do.
The funny part is that I can’t tell whether you’re talking about LLMs or the C-suite.
Buddam tsssss! I too enjoy making fun of big business CEOs as mindless trend-followers. But even “following a trend” is a strategy attributable to a mind with reasoning ability that makes a choice. Now the quality of that reasoning or the effectiveness of that choice is another matter.
As tempting as it is, dehumanizing people we find horrible also risks blinding us to our own capacity for such horror as humans.
I think you’re getting caught up in semantics.
“Following a trend” is something a series of points on a grid can do.
Y’know, the whole “don’t dehumanize the poor biwwionaiwe’s :(((” works for like, nazis, because they weren’t almost all clinical sociopaths.
Lol the point about “don’t dehumanize” has nothing to do about them or feeling bad for them. They can fuck right off. It’s about us not pretending these aren’t human monsters, as if being human makes us inherently good, as if our humanity somehow makes us inherently above doing monstrous things. No, to be human is to have the capacity for doing great good and for doing the monstrously terrible.
Nazis aren’t monsters because they’re inhuman, they’re monsters because of it. Other species on the planet might overhunt, displace, or cause depopulation through inadvertent ecological change, but only humanity commits genocide.
I’d argue they do make strategic decisions, its just that the strategy is always increasing quarterly earnings and their own assets.
They do indeed make strategic decisions, just only in favor of the short term profits of shareholders. It’s “strategy” that a 6 yr old could execute, but strategy nonetheless
This is closer to what I mean by strategy and decisions: https://matthewdwhite.medium.com/i-think-therefore-i-am-no-llms-cannot-reason-a89e9b00754f
LLMs can be helpful for informing strategy, and simulating strings of words that may can be perceived as a strategic choice, but it doesn’t have it’s own goal-oriented vision.
Oh sorry I was referring to CEOs
XD
You’re right. But then look at Musk. if anyone was ripe for replacement with AI, it’s him.
yet…
Sure, but that true AI won’t just involve an LLM, it will be a complex of multi-modal models with specialization and hierarchy–thats basically what big AIs like GPT-5 are doing.
That’s part of why we hate them no?
Hate isn’t generally based on rational decision making.
Its inevitable.
Non-founder CEO’s typically get brought in to use their connections to improve the company of is an internal promotion to signify the new direction of the company. They also provide a single throat to choke when things go wrong.
What will be more likely to happen is that CEO’s will use AI to vibe manage their companies and use the AI output as justification. We don’t have enough data to tell if AI helps the best or worst CEO’s.
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was utilizing AI technology to mass murder people for shareholder profit
And the AI being bad at its job was a feature.
If AI ends up running companies better than people, won’t shareholders demand the switch?
Yes. It might be unorthodox at first, but they could just take a vote, and poof, done.
And since corporations are already treated as “people” under the law, replacing a human CEO with an AI isn’t just swapping a worker for a machine, it’s one “person” handing control to another.
Wat?
No. What?
So you just used circular logic to make the AI a “person”… maybe you’re saying once it is running the corporation, it is the corporation? But no.
Anyway, corporations are “considered people” in the US under the logic that corporations are, at the end of the day, just collections of people. So you can, say, go to a town hall to voice your opinion as an individual. And you can gather up all your friends to come with you, and form a bloc which advocates for change. You might gain a few more friends, and give your group a name, like “The Otter Defence League.” In all these scenarios, you and others are using your right to free speech as a collective unit. Citizens United just says that this logic also applies to corporations.
That means CEOs would eventually have to replace themselve
CEOs wouldn’t have to “replace themselves” any more than you have to find a replacement if your manager fires you from Dairy Queen.
Should be way easier to replace a CEO. No need for a golden parachute, if the AI fails, you just turn it off.
But I’d imagine right now you have CEOs being paid millions and using an AI themselves. Worst of both worlds.
No, because someone has to be the company’s scapegoat… but if the ridiculous post-truth tendencies of some societies increase, then maybe “AI” will indeed gain “personhood”, and in that case, maybe?
I don’t see any other future.
AI? Yes probably. Current AI? No. I do think we’ll see it happen with an LLM and that company will probably flop. Shit how do you even prompt for that.
It’ll take a few years but it progresses exponentially, it will get there.
It progresses logistically; eventually it’ll plateau and there’s no reason to believe that plateau will come after “can do everything a human can.”. See: https://www.promptlayer.com/research-papers/have-llms-hit-their-limit
Sure, but we don’t know where that plateau will come and until we get close to it progress looks approximately exponential.
We do know that it’s possible for AI to reach at least human levels of capability, because we have an existence proof (humans themselves). Whether stuff based off of LLMs will get there without some sort of additional new revolutionary components, we can’t tell yet. We won’t know until we actually hit that plateau.
Current Ai has no shot of being as smart as humans, it’s simply not sophisticated enough.
And that’s not to say that current llms aren’t impressive, they are, but the human brain is just on a whole different level.
And just to think about on a base level, LLM inference can run off a few gpus, roughly order of 100 billion transistors. That’s roughly on par with the number of neurons, but each neuron has an average of 10,000 connections, that are capable of or rewiring themselves to new neurons.
And there are so many distinct types of neurons, with over 10,000 unique proteins.
On top of there over a hundred neurotransmitters, and we’re not even sure we’ve identified them all.
And all of that is still connected to a system that integrates all of our senses, while current AI is pure text, with separate parts bolted onto it for other things.
The human brain is doing a lot of stuff that’s completely unrelated to “being intelligent.” It’s running a big messy body, it’s supporting its own biological activity, it’s running immune system operations for itself, and so forth. You can’t directly compare their complexity like this.
It turns out that some of the thinky things that humans did with their brains that we assumed were hugely complicated could be replicated on a commodity GPU with just a couple of gigabytes of memory. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that everything else we do is as complicated as we thought either.
Yeah a lot of it is messy, but they are not being replicated by commodity gpus.
LLMs have no intelligence. They are just exceedingly well at language, which has a lot of human knowledge in it. Just read claudes system prompt and tell me it’s still smart, when it needs to be told 4 separate times to avoid copyright.
LLMs have no intelligence. They are just exceedingly well at language, which has a lot of human knowledge in it.
Hm… two bucks… and it only transports matter? Hm…
It’s amazing how quickly people dismiss technological capabilities as mundane that would have been miraculous just a few years earlier.
Ive had too many beers to read that.
in all dialectical seriousness, if it appeases the capitalists, it will happen. “first they came with ai for the help desk…” kind of logic here. some sort of confluence of Idiocracy and The Matrix will be the outcome.
You mean dialectical whimsiness
Love that term dialectical seriousness, have to admit i had to look it up :)
