Tech CEOs have this wet dream where they just speak into a microphone, “Create my product” and employees will no longer be needed. So… if it becomes that easy, why will Wall Street need tech CEOs?
Because they already don’t need a CEO to operate…
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board.
That’s it.
Not only this, but they all sit on each other’s boards. There’s essentially one big mega corporation:
That is really interesting.
Excellent point. Modern CEOs are just the face of the marketing org. Maybe always have been.
Because they think they’re special. They think that AI can reduce the number of programmers, the number of support staff, the number of sales agents, because AI allows fewer people to do more.
But there’s only one CEO. One COO. One CIO. They cannot conceive of a company that operates without them, so they feel no threat at all. If they are replaced, they take their golden parachute and hop back on the executive carousel for another spin.
The Dunning-Kruger effect. CEOs (especially ones who joined the company long after it was successful) really don’t know how to do the job of most of their employees. Their lack of knowledge of those jobs leads them to vastly underestimate how complex they are.
At the same time, CEOs (hopefully) know how to do their own jobs which leads them to a more accurate assessment of AI’s ability to do the job: a total farce.
In truth, AIs aren’t likely to replace most jobs in any case because it’s all a house of cards.
Agreed. I have to keep reminding myself that CEOs should really be CLO (Chief Lying Officers). Their job is to lie convincingly.
It’s actually incredible what bullshit masters they are. I consider myself a pretty smart, resolved person, but listening to some of these CEOs speak leaves me feeling confused, deflated, and demoralised.
Even CEOs who start a company, many don’t know the entire workings. They hire people for that. It’s just another investment for them.
love how everyone who mentions that fucking study has to link the Wikipedia article for it.
here, allow me to quote the fucking article that YOU LINKED
In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.
stop bringing up obscure psychological concepts if you’ve got no business in psych!!!
ugh it’s too early in the morning for this level of agitation. I think after years of seeing this study misused on Reddit I’m seriously triggered by mentions of it. and always with the fucking link!! as if we haven’t been on the internet in the last decade
I didn’t say anything about low intelligence. That’s your uncharitable reading of my claim.
you’re right!
Was talking to an executive at my company the other week. He sincerely seemed to believe the “executive insight” was one of the very few jobs at the company that couldn’t be done by an LLM. He predicted that he would probably lay off almost everyone under him by end of 2026 and just feed his amazing leadership ideas directly to an LLM to make happen.
Particularly a bit obnoxious as my usual experience about this guy is being called into customer meetings after he would meet with them. Usually the customer assumes we are a bunch of out if touch idiots if that is a “leader” in the company, and I’m one of the guys sales calls to have me reassure clients that they don’t have to take anything he says too seriously, and we do actually have some competence.
CEOs get paid to do what makes the most money.
The CEOs that will replace their own jobs want the payout of doing so, and don’t care what happens after because they’re rich.
Honestly, with adequate governance, companies would be required to submit reports on how much labor they’re doing using AI, and pay those wages to either their employees or to a sort of “Universal Income” fund to prop up families in poverty. It should be called the AI tax.
The problem is that, with the current state of affairs, asking for regulation from anyone is impossible, and also even if the law were enacted, getting the money from the companies to people who need it instead of the ultra-rich is a major hurdle.
But at the very least, I don’t think we should allow companies to simply cut down on human labor without also contributing economically to the employees they cut off.
I don’t think anyone is dying to fill in Excel spreadsheets or to write corporate emails. No one is complaining about AI doing those jobs, but about people who lost their livelihoods because of it.
We should’ve had that 50 years ago as an “automation tax” and 100 years ago as a “machine tax.”
All this tooling is just dead labour value that is used (by workers) to extract more and more value from workers and nature. We’ve been being robbed for hundreds of years.
AI can’t say ‘i do not recall’ for 6 hours straight under subpoena
Is that happening this quarter or next? If not, its too far away to think about for them.
As soon as shareholders, and the board, feel an LLM agent can reliably do all the work of a CEO, the CEO will not need to exist. But the problem is that LLM agents require human supervision or intervention at irregular intervals. Since neither shareholders nor the board work full time, there still has to be someone to supervise and be available. The role of the CEO might change, and LLM agents might end up taking on a lot of the work they do. Maybe someday the CEO will mostly just be an “idea guy” that networks with other similar people to drum up deals and gets the LLM agent unstuck every once in a while. But it’s very unlikely there will be no human in the loop during regular work hours.
I’m guessing CEOs will be replaced by their assistants, who will just type questions from the investors into the LLM and post the answers into another chat window.
They’re talking about replacing all their workers. The owners will still be ghouls.
Most of the rhetoric we see from businesses and news stations is for the ruling class, not us.
Ai dOeSnT hAvE tHe CoNnEcTiOnS ThAt MaKeS a GrEaT CEO
Easy, replace all the CEOs at every company. Those are the connections. The computers can talk to each other to collaborate much faster than us mere humans. Tll
There’s no possible bad scenario from this whatsoever.
Feed it the CEO’s contact list and email history.
Zoom has literally been pushing this, just feed your whole work text and email history and contact list, generate an AI version of ‘you’, then send that AI avatar to write messages and ‘have meetings’ with other AI avatar of other people…
…and then send you, actual you, summaries of what was ‘discussed’ in these meetingd.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
So they’ll keep their jobs. Until the AI decides to get rid of them, too, but they’ll have some CEO hunger games for those who want to be on the AI BOD. Under the control of the AI, of course.
Edit: CEO games like Robocop’s ED-209
If AI shows that the business will be more profitable without a human CEO, the owners will literally just ignore it.
Exactly. I’m sure countless accountants have pointed to that line item before and somehow we still have a CEOs.
People who are so wowed by the incredible generative output of LLMs and can’t wait for them to fix things need to realise this technology is not for them.
Like all nee tech it may cause a slight shakeup in the beginning allowing for a little upward mobility, but eventually big business folds around it until it only works for the owners.
We’ll all just be working more for less, unless something actually changes.
Who do you think is telling the CEO’s to go full steam ahead on ai? The company I work for openly mocked ai…and then the stock price dropped. The investors said it was because they weren’t investing in ai. Even CEO’s, overpaid clowns though they may be, report to wall st.
This is all kinda moot. There will be no companies to run when the economy crashes because there is no one to buy goods (or even to pay taxes to support government spending). It’s a giant house of cards.
Because it’s not about productivity. It’s about separating people into owners and toilers.
I also have to keep remembering what someone else online said, “They’re no longer selling their product. They’re selling their stocks.”
Because current ‘ai’ can’t even run a vending machine business
