If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.?

I’ve seen headlines where some CEO (usually in tech) had the self-awareness to tell their workforce that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, “including mine.” So at least some of them know it.

Because they don't actually care about "speed" or "efficiency". All they care about is having all the money. Every decision they make is in service of that goal, including what words they say in public.

You see productivity gains have nothing to do with AI. It's being pushed down our throats because some elites have vested interest in its success and it's another way to extract more money from the consumers.

The rich have class solidarity. They're not going to casually fuck each other over like that.

But they're controlled by shareholders and why do shareholders want individual nut jobs running a company when and AI can do it. Not saying we're any where close to AI that can do this. But the idea is neat. CEO of these publicly traded companies seems like the first job that should be axed.
- I assume rich people often keep enough shares to control who sits on the board, and thus who is the CEO. There's a lot of people sitting on multiple boards, folks know each other, blah blah blah.
  Also many shareholders aren't really involved. I don't even know how it works if you own shares through Vanguard or something. I've never been asked to vote on company policy.
  From what I've seen in start-up land, leadership is a lot of in-group bro times. It's all gut feel. Shouldn't expect rational, honest, decisions from them.
- Chances are the shareholders with enough power to sway things are... Other CEOs though
- there is no rationale to capitalism, it's more like a heist
I don't really buy this take. They have petty spats, noncompetitive practices, just like the rest of us. Seems like there are simpler explanations.
- Solidarity doesn't mean they're all in love and never squabble. But it does mean that they will prioritize their class' interests, especially if it's in conflict with labor.

You'd have to be able to program the AI to do a job so the first thing is figuring out what the hell a CEO actually does.

Lie to employees, absorb money, travel needlessly, tell everyone to RTO when they are never in the office, take a fat bonus, fire people, bullshit the board and stockholders, pull ripcord on golden parachute, lather rinse repeat.
Yeah, i think an ai could handle most of that.
“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”
“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.
“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”
- It's gotta be said, Zaphod kind of had a point there.
Schedule meetings, attend meeting, tell others to do stuff. Profit.
Naw, MVP in 2 weeks that can write those company-wide emails they do, and then we work with the client and iterate in sprints.

For a publicly traded business, this could greatly benefit the share holder with a more efficient AI CEO to steer the ship.

Less sexual harassment lawsuits too

Catching crime lords in hypocritical pretzel logic doesn't work. The issue isn't with their logic. The issue is with a society that allows itself to be captured by capitalism.

Kick me in the brain stem if I'm on the wrong track, but I feel like it's by design
In general,
Everyone hates public officials taking bribes
Everyone hates streaming services raising their subscription fees
Everyone hates advertisements
Everyone hates big pharma charging $1000 for a cancer treatment pill that costs 0.1c to manufacture
The throughline is obvious, but I feel most people just take a neutral or dismissive (and sometimes aggressive) stance if you bring it up.
It's that cognitive dissonance that feels engineered.
I don't know how to fix that. Admittedly, I still need to do more reading.
- I think our problem might be starting a slave empire on stolen land and then building a bunch of prisons instead of a society. Maybe next time, don't be born 17 generations into a crumbling colonial slave empire. That's what I'm going to try.

Now there is an idea. But the money that the CEO would be paid would go to workers right? Right?!

Anakin.jpg

AI is currently really bad with business decisions. Like laughably so. There have been several small attempts, say letting an LLM manage a vending machine. I believe they've all flopped. Compare to performance in image creation/editing and programming performance (where, on measurables, they do relatively well). When an AI that could run a business OK exists, you should expect to see it happen.

CEO's are paid so much primarily because the turn to paying them in stocks. This changed because of pay-caps for executives (so to compete for CEOS, companies offered stocks). The idea was that this would align their incentives with the shareholders. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of extremely short term company policy by CEOs, spiking stock value to cash out.

Get out of here with your sensible economic logic. The answer is obviously because CEOs and shareholders are catagorically evil, and make all their descisions with the sole intent of making my life miserable.
- Two things can be true, that’s all I’m saying.

Its likely the only use case that would actually pay off and it makes sense as the board of directors can have it made and maybe even do a lot of chief and vp stuff.

You would not want to use AI anywhere it matters. Only in places where it does not matter if you get it right the first, second or even the third time, like customer support.

We're going inception style now, but then ceo would be even more fitting, don't you think?
It doesn’t matter, so … the CEO is perfect application!

This is possible and much easier than with the people who usually do the actual work that makes a company sucessfull.

For example, this chinese company has done it and performs very well: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html

I think that middle management has more to worry about.

Because the purpose of a CEO is wealth transfer. Controlling the company is purely incidental.

This wasn't particularly true all that long ago. Huge buyouts and benefits for CEOs are both quite recent phenomena. Shareholders had a much better split not that long ago, and the social/family dynamics haven't had long to change so drastically.

i said back when people first started talking about AI replacing workers... if there's one job that can easily be replaced by AI, it's a fucking CEO.

Might end up with more humanity in business decisions by replacing the empathy-devoid CEOs currently running things with something trained on a larger sample of people.

You'd probably get fewer hallucinations.

It is amazing how human CEOs manage to surpass a 100% hallucination rate.

Because the first word of your question is "if".

What you do with money ? Give it to people so they stop working ? CEOs are needed so people earn enough money to survive but not enough to live or rebel against the system. Just like chickens. You cut chicken wings so they don't fly away.

CEO is a political position, not a productive role. The job of the Chief Executive is to be a high level influencer with lenders, high level clients, and other business partners. For AIs to fill this role, they would need to be established as more influential than their human peers.

While its certainly possible (and arguably the desired end result of Microsoft/Google/et al) to replace a C-level with an AI, the end result would be a machine that serves the interests of the operators (presumably Microsoft/Google/whomever) rather than the business for which it is providing the service.

Because an AI doesn't have legal standing. It can't own a company, close contracts, get loans, hire people nor can it sue others. It can at best act as a representative of a real CEO. There's still a human signing on the dotted line

It also doesn't come with daddies money and contacts to set up a startup and call investors.

the llc is a legal entity and has all those powers and even free speech now. no human needed.

CEO's are already using AI as a tool to help them understand their companies by dumping their company data into these models as a way to understand their companies.

I just don't see any company creating an AI to replace a CEO in its entirety, yet.

I know. Right? The rich protect the rich. That's why. They have their own union and you aren't part of it.

There was a study on that I remember about a year ago that seemed to get buried real fast

Who's going to make that decision? The CEO?

The board who determines the CEO's pay for a public company. For a private company whoever owns the company - if that's the CEO then maybe they'd implement the AI CEO then just retire.
- then maybe they'd implement the AI CEO then just retire.
  I think this is the most realistic scenario. CEO outsources her workload to AI as much as possible while still collecting a paycheque.

Just set growth to 10%!

Because we know language models can't run a business.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

They can't do any of this other shit either. That's not stopping us from doing it

Every one of us is utterly replaceable, including the billionaires and multi-billionaires.

For all the status quo that they push for, they don't actually do anything special.

You could take the average billionaire, strip them of all their worth and hand it over to some millionaire, and basically nothing would change as far as the planet is concerned.

This is not a scenario where we are all NPCs to their game. We are all players, but more to the point, they are as expendable and interchangeable as we are.

For a publicly owned company the CEO is in the role because the Board hired them. The Board wants money but doesn't have the attention span to run anything themselves so they get a person who can steer the ship in The Market. A bot doesn't plan, it only reacts. That's an interim CEO at best but not someone who has to approve budgets, product design/experience, and run the people side of things. Plus a boy hallucination could be devastating and no one would know until it's too late.

AI just doesn't have a place.

On top off all that, company culture flows from the top down. Tell me what you think of your company culture, I'll tell you about your CEO. Also, imagine the sheer disgust of ultimately reporting to AI. People might have a few giggles at first, but moral would crash pretty quickly.

Because deep down the shareholders and executives know the company will lose money if an AI CEO is in charge. AI can't even take orders in a drive through ffs.

Because they're the decision makers, why would they remove themselves from that position? Lol