If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO | Hacker News Reader

If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

nytimes.com

73 pointshodgesrm94 comments

I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO delegated. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point.

There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO.

I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day.

The article quotes:

> "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees.

If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.

> It has just provided the CEO leverage.

Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it.

My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters.

Why wouldn't you want this?

Same reason people try to compete in sports without using PEDs, or prepare for standardized tests without a good nootropic stack.

There's some large contingent of the population who believes being "natural" places them on a moral high horse.

> I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction).

The vast majority of articles about CEOs are populist rage-bait. The goal isn't to portray the actual duties and responsibilities of a CEO. The goal is to feed anti-CEO sentiment which is popular on social media. It's to get clicks.

Then why did the CEO's in the survey agree with the premise?

I think part of the idea here is that we’re not talking about putting GPT-4o in charge of a company, we’re talking about GPT-7a (for “agent”). By the time we get to that turn of the game, we may not have as many issues with hallucinations and context size will be immense. At a certain point the AI will be able to consume and work with far more information that the human CEO who “employs” it, to the point that the human CEO essentially becomes a rubber stamp, as interactions like the following play out over and over again:

AI: I am proposing an organizational restructuring of the company to improve efficiency.

CEO: What sort of broad philosophy are you using to guide this reoorg?

AI: None. This week I interviewed every employee and manager for thirty minutes to assemble a detailed picture of the company’s workings. I have the names of the 5272 employees who have been overpromoted relative to their skill, the 3652 who are underpromoted or are on the wrong teams, 2351 who need to be fired in the next year. Would you like me to execute on this plan or read you all the rationales?

CEO (presumably after the AI has been right about many things before): Yeah OK just go ahead and execute.

Like, we’re talking about a world where CEOs are no longer making high level “the ship turns slowly” decisions based on heuristics, but a world where CEO AIs can make millions of highly informed micro-decisions that it would normally be irresponsible for a CEO to focus on. All while maintaining a focus on a handful of core tenets.

This is just saying “if an imaginary thing was good at being a CEO, it could replace a CEO.” Which is a tautology on top of a fantasy.

Do CEOs have much responsibility though? I've only ever seen them punished when they've done something intensely illegal and even then they get off for lighter crimes usually.

Golden handshakes mean if they move on they win. They can practically suck a company dry & move on to another one thru MBA social circles.

I feel like my CEO is already an AI - gradient descent to optimize stock price for the near future and using as many trending buzzwords as possible in any communications and investor calls.

I wouldn’t be so optimistic that most CEOs deliver any value.

> “Someone who is already quite advanced in their career and is already fairly self-motivated may not need a human boss anymore,” said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. “In that case, software for self-management can even enhance worker agency.”

This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.

Perhaps:

- solve problems and conflicts

- escalate if neccessary

- communicate targets

But not:

- provide fuzzy warm feeling of belonging (at least in the companies where you are just a wheel)

So, replacing management is an old idea, but perhaps becoming feasible? Or did I miss something irreplaceable of the human element?

Are we talking about middle managers or line managers?

For line managers, the manager has to talk with human employees, and bad managers asides, that is where the human element comes in: fundamentally, your employees are still human.

On the other hand, if the line managers are all human, then the middle managers have the same human elements, too.

Google did a huge study of what makes a good manager (after trying to do without them) and found that a big deliverable of management is “psychological safety” for individuals when they are working as a team. Without that, people hoard information and spend all their effort to undercut each other, which is detrimental to the team and company overall.

At Google, where they foster a culture of intellectual safety. Their systems are so complex that no one person knows everything, and having people bullshit their way around things is dangerous, so people have up feel safe to ask "dumb" questions in order to make good decisions. At other companies with different cultural values, say Microsoft of the 90's with stack ranking, a good manager may need to foster the opposite in order for their direct reports to succeed in that culture.

Some people feel safer asking the LLM dumb questions, at least I do because of social pressure, but answers could be bullshit. I am retired but I could imagine that I only would proceed if I either had good enough references backing the LLM's answer or if I decided that my question is not so dumb after all and took the plunge to ask a human.

This seems to indicate that AI could relieve managers from answering dumb questions at least partially.

> It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.

Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers:

1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside.

2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.

> Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on.

Shielding ICs and managers below them from bullshit is probably a manager's most important job and they're doing that job well, the ICs won't be seeing their work, by definition, which leads to an interesting paradox.

The problem is that, based on personal observation, many, many current managers are actively bad at helping groups of people work together effectively. As in, I have personally known managers (not my own; this is as a third party, and I've been genuinely lucky in my managers over the years) whose teams would be better off with them simply removed from the picture and nothing else changed, they are that detrimental to getting work done.

Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties. Over time, as with the King/Queen of England, they will become less necessary.

Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team.

Can AIs use spreadsheets yet?

I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.

> Can AIs use spreadsheets yet?

In case that wasn't rhetorical, you can upload an xslt or csv file to ChatGPT and ask it to do stuff and it'll give you answers and can update the file with new formulas that it writes and you can download an updated copy as an xslt or csv. It's pretty neat, for those who need help writing formulas.

> Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties.

"They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties" sounds like the job description of a politician in a democracy. They get hired (sorry, elected) by a mob who knows stuff all about the day to day running of the place and so vote on other issues. As a consequence the people they elect are rarely good at anything other than getting elected. Nonetheless they stand up and proudly claim they will fix everything now they are are in charge, and consequently get blamed for whatever goes wrong during their tenure, and then we fire 'em.

The main danger is when nothing goes wrong. That lets them stay for a while, and if they are actually competent they may start running things, which lets them re-arrange the laws, the police and the judiciary so they are hard to boot out.

If that happens we tend to introduce term limits. We can't have competent managers running the place - that's far too dangerous.

I’m imagining a Dilbert comic a company composed of self organized employees, all working from home, with a four day work week and amazing benefits with the comfort of no non competes, taking a long term view on creating shareholder value.

Delete this and wash your filthy little mind out before your ideas end up tainting our new OpenCEO's training corpus.

(spoilers)

Dilbert S1E2

Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/

The day that AI can do my job is the day I need to quit. At that point, I'd no longer care if it can replace the CEO of my company.

However, I doubt it could replace a CEO. The reason for my doubt is that being CEO is primarily a social job.

That's ok. LLM's are great at socializing together.

What's your job, and why haven't you hired a team of people from a cheaper country to do your job for less than they're paying you? The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job.

Software dev.

> The non-existence of someone/thing able to do my job isn't why I work at my job.

Me neither. The reason that I'd quit, though, is because if my job can be automated then there's no point in doing it. I don't want to go to work every day knowing that I'm just a meat robot who isn't actually necessary.

I'd rather spend my time doing something that I can bring actual value to.

it's a rather dystopian feeling that we're all just cogs in some sort of a machine, but we need money to eat and rent. I want to have actual meaning but what is it all for?

The only way this will happen is if the shareholders realize that they can save money, and generate even more profit for them. Perhaps we need to demonstrate this experimentally and compare the results to CEO's in similar industries. Then watch as it is immediately and resoundingly banned through legislation and rhetoric.

The capital markets are a type of AI, or a least a collective intelligence that is optimized for specific, short term outcomes. If you are a CEO of a large enterprise that relies on equity or debt financing, you don't actually have a lot of agency.

My dad really disliked his former boss at his job. He eventually started calling this boss “VPGPT”, since he was quite confident that this boss could be completely replaced with ChatGPT a year ago without anyone even noticing.

At the end of the day, a business still needs a human to sign on the line and be registered with the state.

Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.

Corporations are already considered people, aren't they?

I could see an LLM arguing for personhood and our lawmakers being dumb enough to agree with it.

> Corporations are already considered people, aren't they?

No, not really. They are considered independent legal entities with a subset of the same rights that people have, but they aren't broadly considered "people".

There are companies registered in the UK where all of the company officers are other companies. I don't know if this is legal (the registrar, Companies House, is notoriously lax) but it's definitely a thing.

It's definitely legal (and not uncommon) in the US, but you can at least trace it up to a human at some point. Those humans, at least in theory, can be held accountable, even if it's their shell company's shell company that broke the law.

The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon.

OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there.

I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example.

But I've been surprised before.

If nothing else a company that is more like a collection of independent guilds or co-ops marshaled by a higher AI level would be really interesting. No idea if it would win in the market. Management presumably does a lot of work, somehow, but if you look at their salaries as a budget, is seems like there’s some pretty significant headroom?

Works where archive.is is blocked:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytim...

That is the path to saving civilization. Get petty selfish ignorant people out of the decision loop. We are monkey-troop-level thinkers and that puts a hard limit on how complex a civilization we can build. The only way forward is to automate some of this, with the selfishness and clannishness removed.

"petty selfish ignorant people" is a pretty good description of the folks pushing AI at the moment.

The article compares CEO's and calculators. If the job of a CEO can be automated, then we each have a CEO in our pocket. Just like we each have a calculator in our pocket. What interesting things would you do if you had Steve Jobs in your pocket?

Of course CEOs can be replaced with AI. Elon Musk proves that it’s not a full time or even a part time job with a solid amount of hours. He “runs” 4 companies and still has time to argue with strangers on the Internet. And he has the gall to ask for a compensation package that equates to $10,000 for each automobile Tesla ever sold.

Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives?

Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified.

It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors?

I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for anything?

It's both unethical and foolish to outsource meaningful decision making to AI.

Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.

CEOs have three responsibilities that I doubt an AI will ever do. 1. Ensure the company has money to operate. 2. Recruit and inspire employees to do their best work collectively. 3. Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.

That sounds a lot fluffier than writing code ;)

Did AI write this?

Obviously a CEO did.

”Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.”

I still wonder if this is something AI will ever be able to do, or if it’s much harder than we suspect and at least several more AI winters away.

It’s basically the is/ought problem, where the theory is that one cannot get to what one “ought” to do based only on what “is”.

Like we might say “it is cold outside, therefore you ought to put on a coat”. But, should you? Maybe you enjoy the cold, or maybe you live in an area ruled by a street gang and your coat is the wrong color and you risk being shot if you wear it outside.

AI could eventually make a much more informed recommendation, with more context, but at some point it begs the question of how close the model needs to get to reality, which obviously has some limit.

Arn't AIs already capable of 1 and 3? Seems like 1 is easily solved with linear regression, not AI really even needed. What is the slope of operating costs, what is the slope of revenue? Is revenue greater than operating costs? 3, well arn't people already trying to have AI solve problems where there isn't concrete data? The only difference is, there is a human between the machine and the levers. ChatGPT will give me a decision, the only thing it can't do right now is enact that decision.

Addition: Hell, it could probably solve 2. LLM that does sentiment analysis. Sentiment drops below a certain level, the model knows to put in an order for Dominos for a company pizza party, since this is about as much morale boasting as most employees get.

Cool. I did not know I could transfer legal responsibility over my corp to a bunch of zeros and ones on somebodies hard drive.

CEOs dont do work, they bear responsibility.

AI cannot bear responsibility, so who is going to take a blame if AI does a very bad job?

If CEOGPT does a bad job you can replace it with Claude.

but CEOGPT doesn't care if it retains or loses the job, it may just randomly lead company to failure just because someone messed up temperature parameter when setting it up

That's how the free market works. AI CEOs that deliver value to their shareholders will thrive while those that don't won't. Trust in the wisdom of the market and everything will be fine.

and put lives of employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders at stake??

sounds like a gamble

> it may just randomly lead company to failure

As opposed to sometimes deliberately leading companies to failure by mortgaging the company's future so they can maximize short term profits, including their bonuses, then leaving before it all bursts into flame?

if CEO is extracting short-term profits, you can be 100% sure it is because Shareholders have demanded him to execute this exact plan.

if the company has failed after squeezing short-term profits, there could be a chance that failure was inevitable, and CEO just salvaged and cashed out what was possible and left debtors/employees/suppliers on the hook, while shareholders (CEOs boss) got paid in $$$

Real-world - the whole "CEOs bear responsibility" thing went out of fashion decades ago.

When the AI screws up - the Board will loudly blame it, then watch as the SecTeam installs a new AI CEO.

Meanwhile the CEO's golden parachute deploys, ensuring that the suffering from their mistakes is minimized, unlike the consequences felt by everybody laid off because of them.

CEOs are consequence avoidance machines.

What? The former CEO is fed to an industrial equipment shredder, under the close supervision of Licensing Auditors from CEOware, Inc.

Could you provide a few examples of CEOs bearing responsibility in practice?

And just to be clear: I don't think we should be considering paying yourself an obscenely high exit bonus after you fucked up as "bearing responsibility".

CEOs lose jobs all the time, yes they get to receive golden parachute - but it is a cost of hiring a CEO. Like severance.

Same way no good FAANG engineer would sign up without good pay package like base+RSU+bonus - same way no good CEO would sign up for a high risk CEO job without golden parachute.

Because it could well be their last job if they fail. or last good CEO job.

Imagine having only one shot at working as Engineer and without ability to jump ship because all your actions are public and you are associated with your company success

> same way no good CEO would sign up for a high risk CEO job without golden parachute

This doesn't make sense

The golden parachute means that these jobs are not "high risk" at all

Oh no you got fired and wound up with a severance package that is big enough that it could set you up for life and you can retire right now? The horror!

That's not risk. Someone working a minimum wage job living paycheque to paycheque is taking more risk when they take a sick day than any CEO with a golden parachute contract ever takes in their whole life

Thanks for replying but I think you might be confused a little. There's no comparing a FAANG engineer with a CEO. The former won't be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives with an engineer's severance package. The latter absolutely can.

you are confused if you dont understand the reason why CEOs have big severance while engineers have smaller severance

Maybe, care to elaborate further?

CEOs dont have an option to jump ship. All their actions are scrutinized heavily since they are public. By accepting CEO job they accepting a risk this could be their last CEO job ever, if they mess up. Thats why they require golden parachute.

If you want to hire CEO, that means your company is in trouble and desperately need good steward. You want to hire strong CEO, but he is taking a risk that he demands to be compensated for in case you change your mind want to change CEO again.

with engineers - risk is smaller, plenty of engineers just jump ship to another company (and many even get a pay bump) after failing at current job. Thats why severance is smaller than CEO

This makes no sense. CEO job carries zero risk if there's a golden parachute attached to it.

risk is not zero, since golden parachute is usually less than potential lifetime earnings as CEO (for top tier candidate).

CEO may get $20 min as severance, but would potentially lose hundreds of mils had he not taken this job, and instead pursued another job that lasted for longer

There are tonnes of CEOs that fuck up and still get jobs as CEOs at other companies. They all go to the same private schools/universities, they've all done MBAs and they all continue to socialise through their careers.

Same situations with politicians and police forces, they create a club whereby all members are unduly supported.

> Could you provide a few examples of CEOs bearing responsibility in practice?

Two of the companies I've worked for have had their CEOs fired/replaced for poor performance.

One of them was also mismanaging finances and spending for his own gain. It became common knowledge in the local investor community. He was never able to return to being a CEO again, except for some unknown company in Europe where he was briefly a remote CEO.

If you want more public examples: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, etc. are literally in jail. Many public companies also ditch their CEOs publicly, and most don't recover to the same career level. You just don't hear about those stories much because they don't generate rage-clicks the same way another dozen articles about Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman will.

I think I should have been more clear with my "fucked up" definition. What I was referring to is not criminal misconduct which you seem to be focusing on but rather failing as a leader/executive in a business sense.

> Two of the companies I've worked for have had their CEOs fired/replaced for poor performance.

Ah. Like employees.

The humans

what fantasy land are you living in? Look at the auto industry, many examples of companies covering up defects which lead to deaths - how many CEOs are in jail? What about the tabacco industry? The company may get fined and please don't try to make some round about argument like that hurts the CEO, even if the company gets fined they're still living in their castles.

Fined, but yet still posting yearly gains. Fines would only work if it meant being fined would resolve to them having to show stock holders that they experience negative growth because of it. Not saying that is the ultimate solution, but its the only way to do it if people are not gonna go to jail. The fines have to be so massive, the company can't post positive growth.

I mean, wouldn't it just do what human CEOs do?

Namely, lay off an bunch of employees then talk about "difficult headwinds" or some such thing?

> CEOs dont do work

It takes a very convoluted definition of "work" to be able to say that CEOs aren't doing any work.

Being a CEO (a real one of a real company of more than a few people that has real customers) is a huge amount of work.

>AI cannot bear responsibility, so who is going to take a blame if AI does a very bad job?

Didn't seem to be a question any AI proponent asked when they said that AI can do the job of a lawyer. Not that I disagree with you.

> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

Or replace your entire business as a more efficient competitor?

Even better, obsolete your entire business as your customers will use AI instead of your services.

A computer programmer can never be accountable.

Accountability is why CEOs exist.

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. -- IBM, 1979

Nah, that's a fiction. CEOs are never held to account. In the cases where they're let go, they get golden parachutes, a $$$ pat on the back. That's hardly accountability.

An AI networking and raising funds? That would be pretty novel

I mean ChatGPT has been very successful at raising funds.

I mean chatgpt is not a company and it does not raise funds.

No CEOs would be allowed to join butlerian jihad that'd happen if AI ever exits retarded indoctrinated kid stage

Even if an AI could replace CEOs, they won't. The entire point of AI is to allow the capitalist class (CEOs and stockholders) to maximize profits by automating away the cost of employees. The people AI is intended to benefit, who are making the decisions about how and where AI is deployed, are not going to declare themselves surplus to requirements.

They've already got something for that:

https://www.cutoutsandcollectables.co.uk/product/elon-musk-a...

and it's smarter.

> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

I'm sorry for the folks who are spreading those rumours. I believe - not only they are non-technical, they lack critical thinking as well. It's not their fault. Each time there comes a new revolutionary technical advancement, we are throwing them into trenches. Then, they are on their own to find and understand - what the hell we have thrown at them.

Back in the 80s and 90s, there were some politicians who were spreading similar rumours that Computers are going to take our jobs away. And, where we are now?

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