Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, this just affirms their value-add.

As a decision maker, the reason you would outsource decision-making to 23-year old PowerPoint kids is so you aren’t responsible for the consequences of your actions.

“Darn, that strategy ended up killing people?? Too bad evil McKinsey told me to do that! I’m just a lowly corporate officer. I wouldn’t have killed all those people if they didn’t show us those PowerPoint slides! I got duped like the rest of you!”

[goes home and counts money]

View on HN

Reminds me of "What people really want from the automated adding machine is not more accurate sums, but a box into which they may place their responsibility."

That service is being provided by “AI” now. “It was't us, the AI made that decision!”

Their attribution on that? Love to know if there were shades of this realization in Babbage's time.

So McKinsey is the first company replaced by AI. Exchanging a few billion dollars of bad advice with a ChatGPT subscription.

On the contrary, McKinsey can also service as an abstraction between the customer and AI. The customer gets two layers of removal from any real responsibility for the price of one.

The problem with that is ChatGPT has some safety constraints. McKinsey is scum of the earth and has no morals or ethics.

As much as I'd love you to be wrong, you're not. There's this common saying among executives: "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM". Here IBM can be replaced by any of the big five and it'll still work.

In management consulting it's big 3 (Bain, BCG, McK) but same sentiment

Reminds me of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schie%C3%9Fbefehl

We already have all the tools we need to attack and destroy any corporate officer who does such a thing. But we also have a rigged, corrupt legal system.

It’s exactly the same phenomena at play like after S.A.C. was found guilty of insider trading / or trading with a black edge Point72 (the successor brand) is more popular than ever with capital allocators. Funny how the world works.

And it's even easier to displace or misplace blame when you control the state-funded media in Canada - like CBC getting $1.6 billion annually, and the other popular channels getting $600 million annually distributed amongst them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com