If AI ends up running companies better than people, won’t shareholders demand the switch? A board isn’t paying a CEO $20 million a year for tradition, they’re paying for results. If an AI can do the job cheaper and get better returns, investors will force it.
And since corporations are already treated as “people” under the law, replacing a human CEO with an AI isn’t just swapping a worker for a machine, it’s one “person” handing control to another.
That means CEOs would eventually have to replace themselves, not because they want to, but because the system leaves them no choice. And AI would be considered a “person” under the law.
> company gets super invested in AI.
> replaces CEO with AI.
> AI does AI stuff, hallucinaties, calls for something inefficient and illegal.
> 4 trillion investor dollars go up in flames.
> company goes under, taking AI hype market down with itAnd nothing of value will be lost.
Y’all are all missing the real answer. CEOs have class solidarity with shareholders. Think about about how they all reacted to the death of the United health care CEO. They’ll never get rid of them because they’re one of them. Rich people all have a keen awareness of class consciousness and have great loyalty to one another.
Us? We’re expendable. They want to replace us with machines that can’t ask for anything and don’t have rights. But they’ll never get rid of one of their own. Think about how few CEOs get fired no matter how poor of a job they do.
P.S. Their high pay being because of risk is a myth. Ever heard of a thing called the golden parachute? CEOs never pay for their failures. In fact when they run a company into the ground, they’re usually the ones that receive the biggest payouts. Not the employees.
Loyalty lasts right up until the math says otherwise.
One must include social capital in the math
The math has never made sense for CEOs
Wouldn’t they just remove the CEO from their role and they would just become another rich shareholder?
Several years ago I read an article that went in to great detail on how LLMs are perfectly poised to replace C-levels in corporations. I went on to talk about how they by nature of design essentially do the that exact thing off the bat, take large amounts of data and make strategic decisions based on that data.
I wish I could find it to back this up, but regardless ever since then, I’ve been waiting for this watershed moment to hit across the board…
They… don’t make strategic decisions… That’s part of why we hate them no? And we lambast AI proponents because they pretend they do.
You’re right. But then look at Musk. if anyone was ripe for replacement with AI, it’s him.
yet…
Sure, but that true AI won’t just involve an LLM, it will be a complex of multi-modal models with specialization and hierarchy–thats basically what big AIs like GPT-5 are doing.
Its inevitable.
Wasn’t it Willy Shakespeare who said “First, kill all the Shareholders” ? That easily manipulated stock market only truly functions for the wealthy, regardless of harm inflicted on both humans and the environment they exist in.
Sadly don’t think this is going to happen. A good CEO doesn’t make calculated decisions based on facts and judge risk against profit. If he did, he would, at best, be a normal CEO. Who wants that? No, a truly great CEO does exactly what a truly bad CEO does; he takes risks that aren’t proportional to the reward (and gets lucky)!
This is the only way to beat the game, just like with investments or roulette. There are no rich great roulette players going by the odds. Only lucky.
Sure, with CEOs, this is on the aggregate. I’m sure there is a genius here and a Renaissance man there… But on the whole, best advice is “get risky and get lucky”. Try it out. I highly recommend it. No one remembers a loser. And the story continues.
I could imagine a world where whole virtual organizations could be spun up, and they can just run in the background creating whole products, marketing them, and doing customer support, etc.
Right now the technology doesn’t seem there yet, but it has been rapidly improving, so we’ll see.
I could definitely see rich CEOs funding the creation of a “celebrity” bot that answers questions the way they do. Maybe with their likeness and voice, so they can keep running companies from beyond the grave. Throw it in one of those humanoid robots and they can keep preaching the company mission until the sun burns out.
What a nightmare.
If AI ends up running companies better than people, won’t shareholders demand the switch?
Yes. It might be unorthodox at first, but they could just take a vote, and poof, done.
And since corporations are already treated as “people” under the law, replacing a human CEO with an AI isn’t just swapping a worker for a machine, it’s one “person” handing control to another.
Wat?
No. What?
So you just used circular logic to make the AI a “person”… maybe you’re saying once it is running the corporation, it is the corporation? But no.
Anyway, corporations are “considered people” in the US under the logic that corporations are, at the end of the day, just collections of people. So you can, say, go to a town hall to voice your opinion as an individual. And you can gather up all your friends to come with you, and form a bloc which advocates for change. You might gain a few more friends, and give your group a name, like “The Otter Defence League.” In all these scenarios, you and others are using your right to free speech as a collective unit. Citizens United just says that this logic also applies to corporations.
That means CEOs would eventually have to replace themselve
CEOs wouldn’t have to “replace themselves” any more than you have to find a replacement if your manager fires you from Dairy Queen.
No, because someone has to be the company’s scapegoat… but if the ridiculous post-truth tendencies of some societies increase, then maybe “AI” will indeed gain “personhood”, and in that case, maybe?
I don’t see any other future.
AI? Yes probably. Current AI? No. I do think we’ll see it happen with an LLM and that company will probably flop. Shit how do you even prompt for that.
It’ll take a few years but it progresses exponentially, it will get there.
Should be way easier to replace a CEO. No need for a golden parachute, if the AI fails, you just turn it off.
But I’d imagine right now you have CEOs being paid millions and using an AI themselves. Worst of both worlds.
Would be cool & funny if they did.
That would free up a whole shitload of money for the citizens! /s
That will be a whole shitload of money for the shareholders
This makes more sense. Dammit!
in all dialectical seriousness, if it appeases the capitalists, it will happen. “first they came with ai for the help desk…” kind of logic here. some sort of confluence of Idiocracy and The Matrix will be the outcome.
Love that term dialectical seriousness, have to admit i had to look it up :)
You’re mixing up corporate personhood and the CEO’s own personhood. He isn’t the corporation. Ultimately, he’s just an employee. There’s no good reason for the board of directors to pay him if a machine can do a better job while costing less. I’m not sure why you might think that wouldn’t happen.
No but the corporation is the person, CEO handing it to AI which then becomes a person.
You might want to read more about corporate personhood. It doesn’t mean that the corporation is considered by the law to be a person, or that whoever or whatever performs the duties of the CEO is by definition a person. It means that a corporation, despite not being a person, has certain rights usually associated with people. For example, a person can own property or be sued. A cat cannot own property or be sued. A corporation is like a person rather than a cat in that it can also own property or be sued. There’s debate about exactly which rights should be granted to corporations, but the idea that a corporation has at least some minimal set of rights is centuries old and an essential part of the very definition of what a corporation is.
True but corporate personhood already gives the legal shell. If an AI is actually running the company’s decisions, wouldn’t that be the first time in practice that courts are forced to treat an AI’s choices as the will of a legal person? In effect, wouldn’t that be the first step toward AI being judged as a ‘person’ under law?
Isn’t this sorta paradoxical? Like either ceos are actually worth what insane money they make, or a palm pilot could replace them, but somehow they are paid ridiculous amounts for…. What?
No, it’s not paradoxical. You are conflating time points.
I won’t debate the “value” of CEOs, but in this system, their value is subject to market conditions like any other. Human computers were valued much more before electrical computers were created. Aluminum was worth more than gold before a fast and cheap extraction process was invented.
You could not replace a CEO with a Palm pilot 10 years ago.
I guess I was being a bit over the top, the CEOs are the capitalists. I guess it’s possible they are doing their job with LLMs now, but just behind the scenes. Like, either they are worth what they are paid, or the system is broken AF and it doesn’t matter.
I just don’t see them being replaced in any meaningful way.
CEOs may not be the capitalists at the top of a particular food chain. The shareholding board is, for instance. They can be both but there are plenty of CEO level folks who could, with a properly convinced board, be replaced all nimbly bimbly and such.
I guess, but they sure shovel plenty of money at say… Musk. So what? Is he worth a trillion? It seems the boards could trim a ton of money if ceos did nothing. Or they do lots and it’s all worth it. Who’s to say.
I just don’t see LLMs as the vehicle to unseat CEOs, or maybe I’m small minded idk.
Musk is a shareholder. He own large parts of the companies he’s the CEO of
