Ask Lemmy

Things get real crazy when the shareholders are replaced by AI.

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...

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.

> 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 it

And nothing of value will be lost.

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.

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.

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.

All of you are missing the point.

CEOs and The Board are the same people. The majority of CEOs are board members at other companies, and vice-versa. It's a big fucking club and you ain't in it.

Why would they do this to themselves?

Secondly, we already have AI running companies. You think some CEOs and Board Members aren't already using this shit bird as a god? Because they are

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.

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 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.

Wasn't it Willy Shakespeare who said "First, kill all the Shareholders" ? That easily manipulated stock market only truly functions for the wealthy, regardless of harm inflicted on both humans and the environment they exist in.

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.

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.

Would be cool & funny if they did.

That would free up a whole shitload of money for the citizens! /s

From what people on Lemmy say, a CEO (and board) isn't there to do a good job they are there to be a fall guy if something goes wrong, protecting shareholders from prosecution. Can AI do that?

Isn’t this sorta paradoxical? Like either ceos are actually worth what insane money they make, or a palm pilot could replace them, but somehow they are paid ridiculous amounts for…. What?

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.

their decisions all seem very formulaic, and they could definitely be made faster if you just typed it into ChatGPT

You're mixing up corporate personhood and the CEO's own personhood. He isn't the corporation. Ultimately, he's just an employee. There's no good reason for the board of directors to pay him if a machine can do a better job while costing less. I'm not sure why you might think that wouldn't happen.