I don't see either of those being able to be done by an AI agent.
Let's replace these motherfuckers.
Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.
If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
No. Oh my god no.
This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed.
Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but the jump to "all are like this" is crazy, and, more importantly, anti-intellectual.
While Proxy AI [0] is not open source, it is free, it is built from pure garage energy, and we are having our summer sale right now. 20% off for HN users.
Just like in Iain Banks's scifi (although those AIs are actually intelligent -- I don't think you need that for a CEO).
AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere".
Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.
I guess that would be at least a nice bang to let democracy finally die. Let's hope that we never see that happening.
___
To expand on that:
I believe that these thoughts are so incredibly harmful to humanity itself, (and, more importantly, I believe that the people in power believe that too,) that we'd be seeing pushback against this.
Maximum pushback, because what the pushback would be defending would be - as said - humanity itself.
Said pushback would be bypassing democracy, because there is no way of arguing with these crazy thoughts. Which would said a precedent, because why stop there.
Which, again, makes me believe that this is some sort of psyop, because I refuse to think that the people on here would really be as blind to the systemic implications of their brainfarts.
___
FWIW, a ruling class worth their net worth would go for the less draconian thing of simply taking away your internet access and forcing you to touch grass.
One that is.. uh.. less signed up on the whole "all people are equal and worth saving" would line up.. idk.. 100 people with these horribly bad-for-humanity ideas and shoot them in the head live on stream or something.
The interesting twist here is that LLM rulers might be more biased towards doing option B, as the statistical probabilities of words cannot _feel_ the chemical hormone cocktail invoked by the mental image of that.
Be careful what you wish for.
The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.
The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.
Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.
Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.
Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.
The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing.
No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
This is the best project ever.
I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)
Which is not bad in itself, but I wish there was a way to balance this out.
Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.
This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).
How? If the bias is in the dataset itself, then it'll be in the LLM decision also, right?
Asking models about politically sensitive events differ WILDLY based on the country that produced that AI.
I am talking about these biased a human manager or executive will most certainly have. We have all seen it.
* Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default.
* Having courage to do the correct, obvious thing even when your team or investors don't think it's the right call. (This might be firing someone everyone likes but who's role is no longer needed, it might be changing strategies away from the product everyone just spent 6 months on, etc. etc. the list goes on). -> Ben Horowitz has called this kind of decision basically the entire value of a CEO. This is also EXACTLY where today's LLMs keep getting worse and worse. They are utterly spineless.
* Having unique skills and credibility to build a team -> This can come from many sources (track record, vision, charisma, specific achievements, network, etc.) , but people need to want to join YOUR team, not someone else's. They have to believe that YOU are going to win against the market. There is no way you're going to have an edge by using a commercially available AI API with an open source harness at the helm. That is just so utterly uncompelling to top candidates.
* Fundraising -> On the surface, very ammenable to AI, but again, as an investor, would you seriously invest in a CEO that is literally replicatable by any other company?
The value I can see for something like this is a human to get a "2nd pair of eyes". But humans have tons of advisors already and generally speaking, getting takes on what you should do as CEO is not the hard part. It's seeing through the fog of war, finding clarity, and then implementing that clarity across the org, which is surprisingly hard.
VCs likely won't demand that you be replaced with a claude subscription. But shareholders might wonder why they should approve a fat package for a meatbag. Private equity, picking over dinosaurs, won't hesitate.
Lindy Fiorina hacking up HP? That job is now mechanised.
This will be epic.
We've been rightfully pissed at companies doing unethical things and getting away with it, as there is simply nothing you can hurt them with.
Why is HN fantasizing about making the companies even less hurtable? Are people here insane? Otoh, a lot of those accounts are just a few months old, so.. welp. Nice psyop we got here.
Most human CEOs are disqualified then. Whenever I join a company these days, they stress how important the company's values are, and they are somehow basically the same as every other company.
Revenge of the nerds.
I have a Claude Pro account.
Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!
The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.
No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.
The CEO is ultimately an employee of the board, and managing the CEO with respect to the board's oversight and interest is a somewhat adversarial challenge.
However, the AI CEO's intentions are fully transparent to the board and entirely pliable to the board's demands. The AI CEO also offers the board the opportunity to retain significant equity shares that materially impact their wealth - in this way AI executives stand to be an even more tantalizing target than fixed labor costs.
Of course, this presumes LLMs will become reliable enough for this, which doesn't seem likely.
And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...
But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
But I do not like the idea that an AI like this could end up ranking higher than human beings in an org chart. That is still pretty dystopian.
-The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
:-)
Ah - never ? Because corpo ladder is rigged? Ok, thats what I thought.
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
Creating an AI executive suite can bring some skills to the table, but it doesn't solve the authority question. I'm curious how this would work in practice...
What happens if the AI decides it wants to commit funds - does it have authority? What if it wants to change direction? What if it wants to fire a developer?
That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260728013424/https://overpaid....
I always cringe when I read this kind of thing, even if it might be true on some level.
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
We glamorize execs but at the end of the day if you watch their careers they have plenty of failures (usually) and generally fail upwards. I’ve known some amazing CTOs and VPs of engineering and they’ve brought more to the table but a lot of what the executive team does is looking at the currents in the industry and trying to make educated guesses about where things are going. Yes more than that but this is a news.y comment.
I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?
I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .
Prove it.
> be a leader
There are a lot of bad "leaders" out there running Fortune 500s, fwiw.
If you just want a sociopath with faux accountability that's not very difficult, dime a dozen.
Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.
I've been a founder, CEO, and combat leader under fire in Iraq.
> Or is it too hard for you?
I guess, clearly, it wasn't. Have you ever lead men in combat when death is real and you are right there as the tip of the spear, with some of the smartest and most high level athletes in the world?
A lot of fortune 500 CEOs are nepo or network hires to grease wheels and laws, but even then, it's not necessary merit or performance based. There are some good ones, but there are more bad ones than good. All will write books on "leadership"!
A lot of you calling things "leadership" in large companies can be done with fairly basic calculations and you don't even need a high functioning sociopath to take the blame. That doesn't mean you don't have a board judging performance.
Also a lot of you are taking things very personal, thinking most of these comments and complaints are talking about some CEO of a 5 or 500 person company, but what many of us are talking about are companies with 50k-100k employees or more (then there's Amazon with over a million).
But yeah...
> "Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly”
Take your own advice.
I'll see you on the front lines.
Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do.
But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.
Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.
And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.
I guess starting with and/or developing a good network is one of the main ways they can gain the confidence for taking responsibility.
This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.
True! And true all day long
If we restored the 1950s tax code that discouraged mergers and kept CEOs from grifting, everything you were concerned about stops happening. Businesses were way more honest when there are thousands of local and regional competitors. Federal tax cuts let CEOs merge everything.
Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team:
Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well.
e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist:
1. is it an issue with the work being given?
2. is it an issue with another co-worker?
3. are they having a family issue?
4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details
5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc
Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below:
- event no one at the company has seen before
- the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out
- those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company
examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy):
a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel
b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away
I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).
The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration.
As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.
I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people.
That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM, and that's the issue. They want a real person they can talk to and see eye-to-eye with. It's the same all the way up to CEOs.
Sure you can have the automated CEO, but who will want to work with them? Won't they just... treat them like a stupid robot, like how we treat computers? Treat them as a tool to accomplish their own motivations? I mean, I never consider if I'm hurting my keyboard when I mash away. So how would an AI CEO actually work, without at least SOME fleshy face behind in front of it?
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.
It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.
You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0]
It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example.
0: https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-tr...
Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.
I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things.
These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee.
CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.
If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc
All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.
Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.
Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr...
Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.
also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai
In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum".
The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology.
In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails.
Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.
It's really, really helpful. So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this. I don't think you need this synthetic org setup to get exec help at a small level. It really helped me with fundraising, incorporation, compliance, and just keeping me on track.
Based on what? How do you judge if those are the right things to work on? As a founder, your number 1 priority is essentially to manage that the company works towards the right thing, but it sounds like to me you're outsourcing that part to a LLM? How do you know what the "right track" is when the track is just what the LLM outlined for you?
Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune?
There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for strategic business advice, they tend to converge toward what is popular and trendy rather than necessarily what is best for the particular situation. They called this "trendslop," and described the response as,
"On strategy, LLMs might be more akin to a freshly minted MBA or junior consultant, parroting what's popular rather than what's right for a particular situation."
I really hope this idea works but just thought I'd share some of the research out there. https://archive.is/OPObK/again?url=https://hbr.org/2026/03/r...
From observation of having worked at 7-8 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.
The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test
Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else
My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
This is morbidly unrealistic.
I never saw LLMs coming.
Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?
See you can add anything there and the sentence will make sense.
I will never vote for an AI system to actually make laws lol wtf are you even saying
So the only potential heat is boredom.
Let me guess, it just happens that the role that you work in is amongst the only that actually provide value, and everything else is just waste.
Developers are among some of the least self-aware people ever, I swear. And I say this as a developer. The God complex instilled in techies in the ‘00s and ‘10s is unrivalled and I’m really enjoying seeing some of you being taken down a peg.
CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
> Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks?... I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
I'm sure many CEOs are bozos who can be replaced by a statistical averaging and guessing machine. But this skill of saying "it's time for us to dramatically change course because the music has stopped" seems to me very contrary to the current LLM paradigm. RL makes the chatbot agreeable ('aligned'). But changing course is inherently disagreeable. It makes enemies and people are going to try to talk you out of it at every turn. I think we'll need a new idea of what LLMs are for, and how to train them, before they can do that. (Much easier to mimic and therefore replace a Ballmer than a Nadella, in other words.)
https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa...
“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”
such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights
Other gem from my new CFO:
“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”
And my new C(3-)PO just told me
“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
It looks like most of the work of the package is reactive -- monitoring external things and responding. It's not proactive just because a person didn't dial it up.
But, here's the thing -- this can likely replace many executives right now, at least those who are reactive managers. I'm in full support -- automate those things if you can.
AI is coming for judgment jobs. It seems it's turtles all the way down.
The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal
In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more
I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
A warning: Don't burn Chrome.
BTW: not all predictions from Neuromancer are there yet...
At this stage, this seems to be a demo, albeit an interesting one. I find the concept still very intriguing, as it is exactly the thing that attacks white collar functions in administrative and executive tasks sets. I need to give it a spin.
The board might have to take on a more active role in instructing the CEO, just as someone managing an LLM now has to be careful how they prompt it.
God forbid the board should make to do more than show up for a few general meetings and collect a fat cheque.
Organizations/Biz requirements (be it scope, money, HR, etc) changes depending on the size thereof.
This assumes that whatever your biz is, it's at Google level. It's too much. Sometimes you need just few employees (few agents) to get the things done.
This app will overcomplicate flows just like in real life. The only lesson I will take from app is how SenteLab created the service, and why (<- so you know when to use this or not)
I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.
Doesn't apply to AI.
I have, on the other hand, seen boards pile all the blame onto the C-Suite. Seems easy enough to pile the blame on an AI.
The "AI CEO" problem is not fundamentally different from self driving car responsibility problems. You need a big entity to be on the hook (financially and legally) if you are really going for lowered responsibility on the decision machinery. I think it can work though (but with a LOT of effort), and that might be an interesting startup idea (we provide 90% of the CEO work via AI, you be in control of the remaining 10%, and responsible for maybe 20% of it; our "insurance" covers the other 80% of the responsibility).
The class war is the Marxist equivalent of BS like the "LGBTQ agenda," "white replacement," or George Soros and his plan to destroy Western civilization by liberal policing. Communism and fascism are the two great totalitarian movements from the early 20th century that are still with us, and both run on grievances and conspiracism. That’s another way of saying they run on “I’m mad, so who do we need to punish for it?”
A CEO isn't the boss. A CEO has two collections of bosses, usually. One is investors / the board. The other is the market, which sometimes includes you. The board wants growth, revenue, and profit margin. You want to maximize value for what you pay, so you also want margin, but for different reasons.
So all the CEO's customers are screaming "reduce costs!" including you. If you're shopping and you see two largely equivalent products and one is 30% cheaper, which one will you buy? The cheaper one. So how do you make things more cheaply? You cut costs. For most businesses labor is the #1 cost. Every time you shop on price you're telling the market to cut wages and labor.
That means when you comparison shop, you're telling businesses to cut labor costs. The board and investors are too, of course. A lot of what looks like a conspiracy can be explained by people doing what they have been incentivized to do, and all the incentives say cut labor costs.
Understand human nature, incentives, and complex systems like markets and how they produce incentives. The world will make sense without the conspiracism.
BTW the idea that all the C-suites are all fascists is also false, and is also conspiracism.
There is a loud contingent of far right ideologues in the tech industry C-suite, but this is just the C-suite subset of the loud contingent of far right ideologues that exist throughout the industry at all levels.
The majority of the industry always has and still does skew either left or left-liberal / left-libertarian. The C suites probably skew that way less than the general population, but your average tech C suite person is going to be somewhere to the left of your average oil and gas industry C suite person for example. I've heard right-wing stuff from C suite types, and I've heard conversations at executive/founder/investor functions that sound like Reddit threads about how Trump is going to declare martial law. Opinions run the whole gamut everywhere.
Conspiracism is nonsense. Yes, there are a few people who do plot and scheme and think they run the world. Most conspiracies fail, because the world runs the world. The world is a complex system full of feedback loops, emergent patterns, and incentives.
Warren Buffett
This is the "unknown unknowns" problem. It sounds like the agent is a reasonably good source of obvious-in-hindsight problems that a experienced founder would have experienced, but a new founder wouldn't easily guess at.
> judge if these are the right things
This problem exists no matter where you get the things from.
As a mundane example, I had an email from my wife about a kid's swimming party she'd RSVP'd to.
My agenda that morning reminded me to pack, inter alia, sunblock and towels for my new car's seats. So it inferred sunblock from the party mention, and towels from the party mention alongside emails talking about my new car (and some "knowledge" that people take more care to protect new cars vs old cars).
Nah. When I talk about CEOs I usually mean founders-turned-CEO because those are the types I've personally known and shared space with. Remember, this is HN.
Most of those guys are megalomaniacs, clueless, or clueless megalomaniacs.
* Lack of focus and discipline: Good founder, huckster, good at sales but won't scale with the business when it needs to start focussing.
* Fearful and nervous: Might start a business but doesn't want to make the wrong decision and so stops the business from growing due to decisions not being made when they need making.
* Not a founder but got the role somewhere once, lacks genuine transferable skills. Might work OK in another business but more than likely just riding the existing success/failure of the new business and leaves after 1-2 years to "face a new challenge".
* The rarest of all. Has all the relevant skills, creative, outgoing, mission focused and makes hard decisions efficiently. Will do well in whatever business they are in but might not be very popular!
CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).
If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.
It was almost like parody:
- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".
- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.
- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.
- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.
This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.
Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.
In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.
And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.
Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.
I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.
In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.
Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.
When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.
Bit like if hn was convinced white cats catch mice better than black ones. Point out that this makes no sense wouldn’t be a fallacy, even if it involves aggregating opinions from people with their own views on cats
But in reality it must be a hugely difficult job. I can’t imagine dealing with so many humans myself.
The wine-and-dine sales prospects will last until agents control purse strings.
At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day.
Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great.
But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe
This caricature that’s occurring could also be thanks to all the horrible CEOs being so visible to everyone.
One of my friend’s medium-size billion dollar-ish company with almost a thousand employees is run by a CEO who is currently in AI psychosis and has started regularly submitting pull requests and demanding they get reviewed as if he’s a member of the development team. He basically comes in with a wrecking ball to carefully planned work with his own daily inspirations that he demands teams far down the totem pole drop everything to work on.
This isn’t an animal that has never been seen, this is a real person that is acting a real fool and negatively impacting my real friend.
We have all been fed this narrative that CEO is the most demanding job in the corporate ladder. How does this CEO have time to be submitting pull requests?
Then you have people like Elon Musk who demonstrate categorically that it’s actually possible to be the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies at once. The fact that this is possible at all smashes the facade of the “impossibly busy CEO.”
Look at how many CEOs have other corporate engagements outside of their primary CEO job. How does Tim Cook have time to be a board member of Nike? How does Satya Nadella have time to be on the board of Starbucks and the University of Chicago?
Logically, if the CEO is such a rigorous job with grueling hours you shouldn’t be physically able to do it at two companies, be a board member for completely unrelated businesses, or run a philanthropic foundation on the side in your spare time.
Then we move on to the "rich guy toys."
How does Mark Zuckerberg have the time to utilize a $300 million yacht? If he's so busy why doesn't he just charter one on the rare occasion he has a week off? Isn't a boat a horrible place to be when you're a busy CEO who needs to constantly travel to company sites, industry and government engagements, and be in close communication with company leaders? Keep in mind, he has owned large scale yachts long before Starlink was a thing.
This is the kind of stuff the CEO of the largest social media company in the world has time for: multiple months of vacationing on his yacht with transponders turned off.
> His $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, has been sailing in stealth mode for the last three months, with its AIS (Automatic Identification System) turned off throughout the European holiday. That’s more than 90 days where the 388 feet long vessel is sailing blind in the busy waters of the Mediterranean.
> Zuckerberg is thoroughly enjoying his time on the newly acquired $300 million luxury vessel. Back in May, the billionaire celebrated his 40th birthday by flying to Panama on his private jet to board the Feadship-built megayacht. A month later, the Meta boss whisked his entire family away on Launchpad on a luxurious cruise to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, which also coincided with Father’s Day.
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-sailing...
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superya...
[0] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a63431790/...
No single human could design a rocket to go to the moon or keep all Wallmart stores supplied on a daily basis. Moreover when something like the CEO or US president changes, the policies and actions change a bit but the majority actually stays the same. This is collective intelligence embodied in the organization and its institutional memory. This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.
Our cells and neurons act based on local chemical gradients and electrical signals and we wouldn't call any single one of those particularly intelligent. Yet collectively they produce human intelligence and even what we call consciousness!
“ and even what we call consciousness!”
This misunderstands the point of the so-called Chinese room thought experiment. You want to conclude that consciousness is functional, but you cite a thought experiment which argues it is not, and then assert the thought experiment is wrong because it disagrees with your preconceived notion of consciousness.
I think organizations' intelligence can only be called superhuman if you ascribe them their own inscrutable goals, different from what people want their goals to be.
But why would you do that?
It's true that a lot of the debate about AI alignment - the good parts, anyway - also apply to human institutions.
The entire financial system is a form of artificial intelligence. We just never framed it that way.
It only shocks humans now because they a) never thought about it - it was in the background b) it’s in your face and you can play with it
But AGI does something additional: It decreases cost for it and increases speed.
Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
That's a feature, not a bug. CEOs should be focusing on the key goals of the business at a high level.
Having an inexhaustible AI CEO that can pay attention to every little thing in the company could easily turn into a micromanagement nightmare.
"I noticed your key pressed were down 27% last week and your agents sat idle 3 nights in a row. And honestly? The thing to hold on to is that it's not a small thing, it's a load-bearing reduction in your output. Let's try to minimize the blast radius with some belt-and-suspenders productivity tips from the bullet point list below:"
Imagine a manager who knows that company needs in a long term support person even if it's not busy at the moment. Because AI has data of historical precedents and actual calculations. And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees, actual humans who perform the actual work and who benefit from good CEO decisions and most importantly the AI CEO which does not gave to be paid gazilion dolars just to burn the company to the ground and leave with golden parachute. I think there is a good insight that AI has very high bandwidth, that human management does not have, no more 2 week meeting marathons just to get everyone on same page and to get all the inputs.
But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
So the responses will be even more incoherent than Opus 5?
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
This is actually my #1 problem with frontier LLMs. They are plenty smart, but they have no true long term memory, and their context window is not nearly enough for a complex system like a corporation. When my project gets big enough and I'm using a lot of /compact, the LLMs always have the same failure point: they fail to pay attention to something.
When they figure this out, I think it's going to be a very, very big moment.
I’m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero
I hope legislation is never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation or become it's legal director. With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it's bots all the way down.
Corporations already exist to limit liability and accountability. This would be an extension of their current purpose not some weird deviation from.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ai-run-companies-are-comin...
It would be useless, given that you can just install a human controller signing (or not) decisions from others: the human remains responsible.
If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt
I’m working through an exploration of how AI will change the Coasean idea of “The Firm” on my site https://chainofbranches.com/conversations/8/branches/59/
Prompts like: you are an activist in XYZ, you wrote this book. Not tell us if this decision is ethical, and if you approve it.
Or running entire HR department in AI...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
Well, that's the final level of AI.
You're probably totally innocent, but this comes across as being AI-written, especially in the context of an AI problem and when your response is pro-AI. For the next 3-12 months (maybe more, we'll see), I suspect you'll have a lot more success if you shy away from those speech patterns.
It's also triggering me. Wait, genuinely triggering me.
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=genuinely&date=all&geo=W...
AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.
It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.
This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)
I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were dismissed. Hence the somewhat out of character rhetoric.
We have organizations of people for the usual reasons. Scale. Specialization. Robustness against failure and errors. All those wins apply to structured groups of LLMs. So this has a reasonable chance of being useful. It's expensive at the moment, but probably cheaper than the management team it may replace.
For some reason, this idea seems to upset people. Unclear why. Comments?
This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It also presupposes that success is zero sum and winner takes all, which isn't always the case (example: when you're building out a new market segment, it can be beneficial to have competitors that are also building it out).
It’s the premise of the thought experiment: to be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve a competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment
I suppose you can claim that a profit can still be generated by offering a holistically worse service/product with no single advantage than a competitor because markets are not efficient, though this may be short lived
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out.
These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
Well, so do most CEOs.
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
At least the good ones do.
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours.
This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back.
I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip.
CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
Of course, if those max amounts of things have few consumers because most people are just too poor to afford them, that'd make companies (or the agents that run companies) think twice too. At some point these AI agents might work together to come up with an economic system to make it possible for society to afford their products so they could further grow.
We need UBI. Taxes are still there anyway, company income/profit tax, VAT, and maybe we can have other taxes too for automatically-generate income, same as with investments/dividend/gambling tax and stuff.
> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
A constant push and pull between leaders and the led is the fundamental. Criticism in both directions is necessary and healthy, and at different times both correct and misplaced.
There have been great leaders and awful ones. Acting as if all leaders are proven and deserving is as asinine as naming all CEOs as useless.
Right now we are at a point where CEOs are biased towards being quite anti worker and too easily rewarded. It's not surprising the cliches against them come out.
This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.
For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.
Not at all.
But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.
https://juliawolffenotes.home.blog/2019/08/28/robot-shell-co...
Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.
Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".
Most software is dime a dozen.
Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.
When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.
Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...
Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.
Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.
Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.
Overall health: mixed.
Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.
The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.
You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.
(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)
The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control
Good point re expert systems. I need to look up what actually made them fail, or how they are not scaling.
Have you been working in the space?
this depends heavily on what is easier to do: social engineering or prompt engineering.
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.
Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.
Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.
Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.
For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.
VC: "Hi, I'll offer you $3.75 for 95% equity and a load bearing position on the board"
CEO Bot: "You're absolutely right. Agreed!"
You live in an ivory tower bubble if you truly believe this
Most people aren't even aware that anything even near this level of automation exists.
Press X to doubt.
In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.
Only failure is actionable, in which case said managers will make a good effort to shift blame.
So if your boss is an idiot and an a-hole, and you have to work twice as hard because of it, you are enabling the bad working conditions he's subjecting you to.
But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.
MBAs are just components, and the cost of that component just went down.
Even as a temporary consultant, at a company for only a couple of months, I remember seeing the CEO walk the hallway, greeting every single person on the way between a meeting room and the bathroom. I can barely remember my family member's names, or the last thing we talked about, let alone have the memory space for all that information to seem kind and courteous to "low level" employees.
In my entire career, I've never worked at a behemoth-sized company, though, so my experience has been much more "intimate" environments, and primarily in consulting firms or satellite offices away from the main HQ (even by only a couple blocks some times). So everyone in the office knew each other.
Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated:
1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others.
2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
I had a physics prof ~20 years ago who made a point of memorizing the names of every one of his intro physics students by the second week.
Frankly, "AGI" just seems like a return to Antebellum slave economics.
Free labor is a C-suite's wet dream, and it has been since the 1520s.
Yeah "AI" doesn't work but that doesn't matter. Your boss believes that there is a coin-operated robot slave that is smarter than you, never gets tired, and never talks back. Good luck getting that raise now, asshole.
The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive, but since it was an executive in a position of making decisions that damaged or ended the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, they would give him a pass (and directions to other executives/billionaires).
And he pleaded guilty. There’s nothing “alleged” about this conversation, despite feelings about any other aspects of it.
Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.
I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.
Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.
Whereas no one on the set of e.g. Suits has ever had contact with the legal system
People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood. That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[2] https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/milton-friedman-the-fa...
You can maximize profits whilst destroying value btw.
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
My basic argument is that human *intelligence* (and understanding - I consider understanding as part of intelligence and consciousness separately but I can see how many might group understanding with consciousness and leave intelligence on its own) is a form of collective intelligence. Individual neurons acting based on local chemical and electrical signals collectively produce behaviour that we call intelligent, i.e. it can solve problems, respond to questions, etc ... . A particular configuration of neurons acting together I will call a particular software or algorithm (I understand that separating the software from the neural substrate in that way is part of what's in dispute, particularly by Searle, but that's my belief and what I feel is required to make the mapping to the Chinese Room argument). The Chinese Room thought experiment then is trying to refute Strong AI by arguing that the person in the Chinese Room has no understanding of the exchange with the outside world because they are just manipulating symbols incomprehensible to them. I agree that the person has no understanding. That person on their own would not be able to string together a sensible reply without the instruction cards. However another person with the same instruction cards, i.e. algorithm, would be able to reply sensibly, pass a Chinese Turing test, etc ..., thus demonstrating that the intelligence/understanding resides in the algorithm. The person is just an execution substrate. The mistake in the Chinese Room argument is identifying the locus of understanding in the person, which imho is failure of imagination. It's akin to saying that humans can have no understanding because each individual neuron has no understanding of our actions, something which the existence proof of human intelligence refutes.
What then of consciousness? Here I also have some beliefs which I'm happy to write down but in my assessment they're less substantiated so make of them what you will. I saw some things by Joscha Bach recently and I liked what he said about agents and consciousness as a form self-recognition of the agent as an entity in the environment and predictive modeling of future states of that entity in order to achieve the agents goals and realise some form of agency. I don't know where neuroscience and cognitive science stand on this but made sense to me as a sensible model of consciousness. Therefore I would even go so far as to say that I believe that entities such as the United States of America (and any country or institution really) are probably conscious in some form, because they are aware of themselves, model themselves, and try to project their agency in the environment that they find themselves in. We are not directly aware of this because we are like single neurons in our brain and this happens at a scale much larger than us. Moreover I suspect that as you go up each rung on the emergence ladder, the temporal scale of the phenomena gets an order slower as that level is composed of the interactions at the level below it. So the speed of interactions of our neurons is an order faster than our conscious processes and similarly the emergent bodies and institutions that we form part of act an order slower so their processes are more difficult for us to perceive.
Schematically then my beliefs organise roughly as follows:
- intelligence = algorithm: think neural network weights you can download of HuggingFace
- consciousness = self-aware world model + state: I speculate that the same NN world model weights running with separate state would perceive themselves as separate entities
Would love to hear some thoughts on this!
Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway
Not really. If they did, markets would be more stable. Look at the prices of commodities such as copper. Prices swing up and own by as much as 3x, despite both supply and demand not changing much. That's the problem. If supply and demand have a lot of inertia, and thus lag, the feedback loop becomes unstable. This is basic control theory. Hedging with derivatives was supposed to add stability, but doesn't work very well for that purpose.
The opposite of a market solving a resource allocation problem is the command economy, where some (small) group people are tasked with decisions like how much copper to actually produce. Instead of price swings, you get shortages.
In any case, the point in my parent comment is that crowd intelligence solves some problems that cannot be easily solved by human intelligence (command economy vs free markets). But i would not call crowd intelligence a super intelligence.
Then why do we still have homeless and jobless?
Organisations pursue goals with agency and there is even Darwinian competition between them in many cases.
It's more akin to an ecosystem to me. In nature we also have ecosystems organising and reusing resources but I would only ascribe intelligence to living organisms pursuing individual goals with agency.
Haven't thought too hard about the distinction though so happy to be shown a better principle.
Yeah, wasn't claiming that it was particularly novel or divine insight, otherwise I might have tried to publish a paper about it. I was just recounting my experience on this matter.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
The expression makes sense (a not dissimilar "trickle down" got accepted...). But used like in the text above, "the blast radius of your reduced productivity", it better be satire.
This sounds cool, will start using it. Thanks!
You’re just describing a company owned by employees who manage themselves. The AI isn’r relevant to your story other than being a proxy and note keeping apparatus for them.
There is no such thing as common sense without shared assumptions. So if those shared assumptions are incorrect or not given at all the output of the models will be nonsensical. In order to truly act human there is a need to experience humanity from the first person.
This is why I think technology will get more and more invasive. Meta glasses now, personal agent devices later and neural implants after that with data sharing enabled.
Unfortunately you can't get your em dash back, ever. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Long live the em-dash. Or en-dash surrounded by spaces if you prefer UK style (which I do).
More likely, they're all wrong on this accusation. A bit concerning to see how many of them are throwing out a false positive like this. Makes me wonder how many of them are falling for actual AI traps in the real world. :)
There have been some successful attempts to do science like this (https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario). Denario generated 1k+ "solutions" on its way to winning the FAIR Universe challenge, and they all had to be fed through a fitness function of some kind to assess them. It also got stuck on a local maximum and had to be kicked in the ass by a human to get it off that.
When writing software, that fitness function is relatively closed (when I run it, does it do what I want?). With something as open-ended as managing a business... might as well roll dice, IMO.
My belief is that 20's LLMs have a lot in common with 90's GAs: the more clearly we can define "success" for a given task (the fitness function) the more successful they can be. Open-ended problems are somewhat beyond them right now, and, I suspect, forever.
(The comment that's currently at the top of the discussion, about making an "AI Boss" that remembered everything about the company, and fed the user three tasks a day? That's not an AI Boss, that's an AI Assistant with different framing.)
I actually upvoted your post. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I was interested to see more discussion about it, and that felt worthy of an upvote.
As for the reaction against the idea, I see it from two angles. Is the standard corporate hierarchy / architecture really the optimal organization principle for AI? Or is that just a skeuomorphism to make this project seem more serious than it really is? Maybe Yegge did us a favor by mapping to Mayors & Polecats, forcing people to question if it really is the correct organizational hierarchy?
The other angle is heresy here - HN is full of employees now. There is little incentive for employees to be interested in what a C-suite does, and we see that with the comments about CEOs needing to be six foot and walk impressively. Employees have no interest in AI organization principles that optimize them away and highlights their obsolescence. I am surprised there hasn't been more discussion about how this specific project optimizes away the C-suite humans instead - I would have thought that could have had some appeal to employees, at least until those people realized it makes employees a swarm that works for AI leadership.
As for AI organization, the organizational mapping needs to be productive, not affectation or cargo-culting. That's not peripheral — that's load-bearing. Especially in a corporation model, you can find the organization layers only create busywork with lots of unnecessary middle managers. You don't want your AI C-suite swarm burning tokens on endless meetings about what should be in the upcoming meeting... especially not at Fable API pricing.
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but want to ensure continuity beyond my ability or interest to do the labor myself. (Sometimes this is by my wish; sometimes by the wish of consumers of my service.)
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but not want to expose my entire net worth to the financial obligations of the company.
There are plenty of cases where a single person company makes good sense.
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
The people who make the rules (by brainwashing the population through a trillion dollar advertising industry what would make Pravda blush) only want to help themselves. As long as they have enough toys to prevent a French Revolution or for other people to take their wealth, they’re happy.
200 years ago, even 1000 years ago, the rich had to live in the same towns as the masses so they did actually put effort into keeping them nice. Building amenities, providing jobs, etc.
They don’t have to do that now. Power extends far beyond a 20 mile radius. They don’t have to go anywhere near the people.
I think a resource consumption based tax model extends very neatly to a UBI model. One could think of as: "this is the basic resource consumption we allow each person" and it automatically generates demand for basic services everyone should be able to afford with their share of resources, while keeping a free market and allowing an economy on top with extra resources. Standard money could still be the means for value exchange, just taxing works differently.
Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.
Some work is 24/7 basically, when you have to keep business afloat there are no sick days or worse days. Your brain is 24/7 preoccupied with the work.
Meanwhile you walk out after 8 hours and stop caring at all because - someone else does
Someone else grinds to provide you with employment so there is work at all and the company keeps sailing.
I am sure you guys are smart, adults. stop being so childish and immature. You are better than that
Meanwhile most companies prohibit side jobs for us plebians (sorry, "non-executives".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
or, more probably I have used a fallacy to analogize the wrong fallacy :)
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
Last 5-6 years: COVID surge in HN brings in more people
Last 3-4 years: General rise in AI topics which have broad appeal and brought in a lot of people
Last 2-3 years: More overtly political discourse on HN bringing in more people
Last 1-2 years: Bots start coming in, some are very obvious, but they have gotten better and better to the point its hard to tell anymore.
Last year: Sharp rise in shallow redditor-style comments, especially in cultural/political discussions comments that are snarky but contribute little to discussion outside of affirmations like "Laws are for poor people"
We do. "Class war" is just the succinct phrasing for "people who earn money through capital returns have vastly different incentives than people who earn money from their labor, and they also have the means to turn those interests into political leverage".
When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible.
The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happens to align with the current in the river.
If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one. That’s where our current one came from after all. They are the intellectual and social descendants of the mercantile capitalists who overthrew the feudal order.
It’s pretty common for the new boss to end up becoming the old boss because they are also monkeys with the same limbic system.
Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
I also suspect really deep change would require genetic modification that alters the structure of the human central nervous system, since a lot of this stuff is just ape behavior writ large.
My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
* The canonical book on the subject - The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882
* https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/what-is-distr...
* https://practicaldistributism.com/distributism-basics/
And not directly related, but full of mineable thoughts, the papal encyclicals of the last 100 years on economy, including Rerum Novarum (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...), Quadragesimo Anno (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docume...), Centesimus Annus (https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...), and the very latest Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...)
How true is this? Certainly trust busters like Teddy had a lot of political power. Though I wouldn't call them a new capital class.
> Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives.
You're advocating for political consumerism? I suppose it has some use alongside boycotts and the "buy made-in-the-USA" movements of old. Sadly today the label is so watered down I doubt one can reasonably know whether any given purchase has any significant manufacturing or resources from within the USA. Ultimately we have to pull all the levers to enact change. Because the top 1% certainly isn't holding back.
> My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
Of course that would go against the class war idea, then you can't blame others anymore. You'd have to accept how this objective improvement to your life as a labor income dependent person would also crush your own dreams of earning capital returns yourself.
“I’m just doing what the market rewards” and “if I don’t, the next guy will” are the 21st century billionaire’s “I was just following orders.” It creates a race to the bottom.
This in turn leads to every problem being abstracted out of its context, and attributed to malice instead of error. Thinking this way completely hampers the ability of human beings to make incremental progress on anything at all via net-positive social engagement with each other.
The "class struggle" idea is of the most debilitating memetic diseases that's ever come about in human history.
Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own boundaries inside a continuum of variation, and where you draw them is something you're choosing based on the purposes you are pursuing and the assumptions you have made, not mapping out something that's intrinsic to the external world independently of you. "Category X includes object Y" is a property inherent to the definition of category X; it is not a quality inherent to object Y.
And when the things you're classifying are other people, and you're trying to develop a taxonomy that models their behavior, you have a situation where the entities you're analyzing are self-aware beings whose behavior is driven by the analytical models and taxonomies in their minds, not the ones in yours.
People who propose class theories as a usable model for understanding human intentions and behavior lump other people together according to their own criteria, even though those people can -- and often do -- make their own decisions according to completely different criteria. People do not see strangers as having common interests or values simply because a third set of strangers have reduced them to data points that fall into the same bar on a narrowly tailored histogram.
When put to the test, these class theories consistently fail to predict actual human behavior, and people with normative attachements to the theories then to hand-wave away these discrepancies: "false consciousness", "voting against their interests", etc.; these notions are layers of epicycles meant to sustain a speculative theory in the face of falsifying evidence.
Much better to do away with a priori class theories, and just analyze what actual people are actually saying and doing.
To abstract all of this into some generalized notion of "class struggle" that presumes that that "workers" as a category are at all times locked into a zero-sum struggle against all "bosses" is not just empirically false, but is actually a notion that has at times been calcified into a dogma used to justify incredibly destructive and oppressive behavior.
The prioritization of categories over human beings in the attribution of moral agency is a profound error.
EDIT since I can’t reply:
It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc.
So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent.
I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
Cause we’ve never seen capital holders collude to keep wages down. Certainly never in the technology industry. It’s just pure competition as nature intended.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I'm clearly talking about an attitude that basically all capital owners are in secret cahoots with each other to destroy their sworn enemy: workers. Aka, the class war they don't want you to believe is happening.
It's all nonsense.
You do have bad actors amongst labor but everytime labor tries to coordinate together the union crushing apparatus comes out so you don’t tend to see as much coordinated bad activity.
And with AI we’re not seeing companies chomping at the bit to make all their employees more productive left and right, we’re seeing them chomping at the bit to see how many employees they can cut
You denialists have one favorite go-to rebuttal, don't you?
So that would be like if I took 6 work weeks weeks off per year to work full time at some other company.
The article I linked specifically mentioned that private company boards demand less time than public company boards, around 200 hours, roughly 25 work days.
Any of these figures is pretty close to my entire yearly PTO allocation as an individual contributor.
Nike consistently has 5 board meetings per year, so Tim Cook is taking time out of running the second most valuable company in the world to do that, for some reason.
Because that is what actually gets pursued. The set of effective goals an organization is distinctly different from those of any of the individuals in that organization.
The set of things an organization ends up doing may be distinctly different from those of the individuals, but that does in no way oblige us to ascribe agency to the organization on its own.
What’s the primary goal of any for profit business? To survive for eternity - going concern in perpetuity that is hopefully very valuable.
These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.
It's either AI-assisted or someone desperatelly trying to impress "unknown people" with their non-existent intellect.
I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.
At this point it's super annoying for me to have my "AI wrote this" alarm trigger at my own language, as I'm writing...
Random Internet people are not impressed.
Previously, most people would save their effort for things that actually mattered. Take away the effort and this is what you get.
> <totally vague statement>. This matters.
Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it.
The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently.
> banning speech patterns
AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway.
I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.
The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.
At least that's my prediction.
Also sometimes known as 'The Gripping Hand'
The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication.
So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
(Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
This is not a competitive advantage
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/oklahomacity/press-release...
I can totally see this blame being shifted to AI in a "nobody got fired for choosing IBM" way.
Huh. Never would have guessed it, in a million years...
To be fair, "Famous person accused of being an AI," was on my bingo card. It was inevitable for this kind of embarrassing mistake to happen.
By pure luck I even landed on a comment that uses that same word with a similar sentiment, except back then he wrote it as a full non-punchy sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414288
Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point.
The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
For that type of content YT is essentially completely ruined if you didn't already follow the good ones because finding them in the absolute sea of dross has become way more difficult.
It's long READMEs with 3 punchlines per paragraph for a project best described has "I found these 4 thingies, all of them had compromises, so I told Claude: merge the 4, no compromises!"
And every issue, every PR you open, about every small improvement or new feature, is the same.
Smart people want others to understand them.
In early days of Internet, it was a domain of smart people. And native English speakers have no problem communicating with people from Ex-Comecon countries with vey little English knowledge.
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25948632
Cool. Standard local interest story.
Then, it cut to a photo montage, with “her” voice, continuing the story.
Except it was AI. It wasn’t especially successful. You could hear the “tics” from the AI.
However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
Also class struggle is not about an a priori theory. If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too. You can see for instance that billionaires think and act in a specific way, which is widely different than, and against against the interests of, a common working person. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between a boss and their worker. You can observe this and they will actually say this if you ask them.
Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed. A slave is obeying his master because it’s the best option for him under that circumstances. Maybe he’s not even aware of the possibility of other options. He may even say that his master is a very good individual and he’s proud to be his slave. None of these means that there is no conflict between those two classes, nor there are no classes.
Of course there's a literature on it. Tribalism is one of humanity's most primitive traits. Being principled, reasoning, and being fair are the unusual things that develop and are developed by the most advanced civilisations. Just having different prices in shops based on who you are is normal. Having a set price for every customer is the advanced version, and less common.
No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding.
The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world.
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis?
> Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks.
> If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too.
If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs.
> Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed.
Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis.
People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available.
Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests.
In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.
You can, you just assert that everyone is a worker and a capitalist simultaneously and that these individual components exist independent of their classification and the assortment of people into groups of classes and that what you call class is just the mundane reflection of some of those components outweighing other components.
When I suggest a tax on holding cash, hardline communists will argue along this insane line of thinking "this will impact workers the most because they are holding most of their net worth in cash". Ah yes, the capitalist worker, fighting for his capitalist interests. Amazing. What was the class struggle about again? Blaming others and absolving yourself of your own responsibility to fix this mess of an economy? Great, you are the problem!
Any remotely sane person siding with workers would realize that workers have an asset known as their own body including the associated lifespan of that body and this is an asset that is producing a future income over time. This asset is illiquid and completely exempt from a money based tax, but if you were to introduce a true wealth tax on all physical capital, the government would not be in the wrong if it assessed the "net worth" of your body and taxed you accordingly. So the ideology of taxing property directly is inherently a tax on labor and therefore not much different from a capitalist taking a cut from your labor. Meanwhile the tax on holding money is purely a tax on a passthrough asset that nobody should hold significant quantities of to begin with. In a hypothetically perfectly optimized society, nobody pays that tax because the transient money supply is zero, that's very different from a tax that grows indefinitely.
I think I get the angle here, but the whole thing about a single category/classification/abstraction against a continuum is that it doesn't need to speak to or predict the entire continuum, or to every quality and aspiration of one of its members. One set of things, "those items which have X", need not exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?
I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Sure. What I'm pointing out is that using the concept of social class as the lens through which you analyze all human social interaction, and draw conclusions about the entire fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.
And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?
> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.
Don't we at the very least want to know who might, for whatever reason, not be able to support themselves day to day? So they don't like starve in their homes? Is there at least an answer for that? An aggregate which might past muster?
I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.