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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.

In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.

What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?

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AI cannot replace CEO the same reason AI cannot replace your girlfriend.

I think your workplace might have a problem with sexual harassment.

I think you misunderstood his (quite obvious IMO) point.

Both the original point and subsequent joke were quite obvious. So much so that I’m considering whether your own comment is performance art

Talk for yourself.

> Teen boys are choosing AI girlfriends over real ones for "maximum control, zero rejection"

https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-g...

> The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-gi...

Wow, look at that, teenage boys making awful choices, who’d have guessed

Awful choice for whom exactly? From their point of view, it is the rational choice.

Awful choice for themselves and their futures. They may think they are making a rational choice but they’re not thinking about the future. Just like teenagers have always done.

Not that any of it is gender specific. The women on /r/myboyfriendisai are making the exact same mistakes, in many ways it’s worse because many are fully grown adults.

... Yeah, that's a replacement for your girlfriend kind of like watching TV is a replacement for eating dinner...

Not a great analogy. These kids are partially satisfying something with AI girlfriends. I'd liken it more to people giving up on food and living on Soylent.

Because I don't have a CEO?

Think you’re going to need to elaborate on that

AI can’t replace genuine 1:1 human interaction. We’re social animals, and a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.

But how much of a CEO’s job requires 1:1 human interaction? If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?

If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings they’re going to be surprised how much laughter they get in return.

> If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings

Oh hell no. That's not where the value lies.

You can't send an AI CEO as part of a trade delegation. Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens. That's the sort of thing a human CEO does that an AI can't.

Why does it have to be a CEO? You can always send somebody lower down, who actually knows their stuff. Requiring it to be the CEO is just dumb status games.

> Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens

But they’ll have an AI CEO too. They will discuss and make a deal.

>But how much of a CEO’s job requires 1:1 human interaction?

Basically all of it

> If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?

Because your job is different than a CEO (and it's also not true for your job)

> a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.

If this were so obviously true there wouldn't be nearly so much concern about people having relationships with AIs.

No, that’s why there is a concern. They’re replacing human relationships with things that superficially look like human relationships but have no depth.

No, that's other people being concerned, it's not the people in the relationships that are concerned.

The position was "a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human" and quite clearly to some people it can, so the statement is false.

It CAN replace all that corporate lingo bullshit. And that would be great.

the AI and your GF have things you desire that are irreplaceable: social status.

A CEO's job isn't the one that everybody here apparently thinks it is. A CEO's job is networking, marketing and PR. They get paid the way they do because they can get into the rooms they need to get into to build the inter-business relationships they need to build.

So you’re saying that what makes them able to be a CEO is that they became a CEO

Yes, but the way you're phrasing it suggests there's something getting lost in translation. A CEO's job is to perform the role of CEO: when the head of engineering wants to zig, and the head of marketing wants to zag, they need to choose between the two in a way that leaves no question about what the decision is or whether the direction should be followed. I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way, I certainly wouldn't.

>I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way

You clearly haven't encountered the large group of people who trust hallucinated LLM output more than their coworkers.

When they like the output, sure. I've never had any luck convincing them to change course by showing that I can prompt an LLM to say something else.

That's right. Obviously they need to build a network before they become a CEO, but that's what Ivy League's, family connections, and exclusive private schools are for.

Hire a pharma rep to do those public-facing parts of the job, hand over strategy and analysis to the bot.

Because she's in bed with the board?

In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)

An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.

in 1992 middle management was 9.2% of the workforce. in 2022 it was 13.1%

use data when you make claims

Bold words. Those are not the same middle managers. Do research before you counter claims.

Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.

Is it the same kind of middle management? Was the 1980 kind well paid, and the current one not?

(I have no idea, but now I wonder.)

> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.

A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.

Which they don't take responsibility for anyway.

Hire a theater kid and put a knob in its ear.

> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.

what? how? literally what work is already not done by some subordinate that an executive does now?

if some work can be replaced, its already done by some employee. those employees are susceptible to replacement.

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