AI, even in it's current state, is probably overkill to replace a CEO.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
563 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
71665 readers
3425 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I actually think an AI would do a better job at running corporations than a human would. Even if it's just an LLM. And I don't mean in a pro-corpo way.
Dude looks like the Delamain ai.
Oh man... I don't wanna have to chase down all his split personalities 😩
That took so long to find a couple of them.
The ones that were most bothersome for me are the ones you have to chase around. You can not possibly stop them until the scripted ending of the chase, and I just don't like not being able to get them stuck between my car and a wall super early to just get through the quest faster. I like being rewarded for being better than they anticipated. 😔
Huh I read a dystopian short story about AI micro-managing workers, constantly telling them what to do next to optimize productivity. It ends with near "perfect" dystopian wealth concentration. While in another part of the world they used AI to create a utopia.
Oh it was called Manna by Marshall Brain
The gradual takeover of jobs by AI (starting with fast food), The warehousing of the unemployed in state-controlled facilities, A techno-utopian alternative (Australia) where AI liberates rather than enslaves.
Or you could fire your boss and form a worker cooperative run on consensus based decision making. Worker cooperatives succeed more than "traditional" businesses and have higher pay for their workers^1, despite being at a systemic disadvantage for seed capital. You don't need an ai to boss you around, you and your coworkers can make collective decisions without any boss to speak of.
Ok I've had it. After decades I'm finally going to watch this.
Be quiet!
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
Did you see him repressing me?
Ni!
load more comments
(2 replies)
I've often thought that worker cooperative call centres should be a thing. The people who manage call centres barely understand the contract because inevitably they higher management from outside of the company, since no one on the phones could possibly be management material.
It would probably make quite a lot of money because one of the biggest complaints that companies have about their third party call centres is inefficiencies. Even if the bosses wanted to fix the inefficiencies they can't because they don't understand the contract at a base enough level. In a workers cooperative that wouldn't be an issue since the workers would understand the contract.
Unfortunately it probably would face the issue that all new starts in the industry make, in that most businesses are locked into multi-year contracts with their call centre providers and can't just swap to a new provider whenever they want. So you'd have to time its startup very precisely as a big company came to the end of its contract, or you'd probably have to get some clients on board before you even started.
Some of those inefficiencies are by design though, especially for any department that might pay out to the customer for the company's mistakes. You would make a well reviewed call center that big companies don't want to hire because they'll actually do the job.
This is a very good idea. I worked call centers in the US when I was younger and they all suffered from terrible, abusive management.
Why don't you start it? I have experience in cooperative development and could help provide some guidance on getting started (for free of course; DM me if you like)
Most people work for terrible bosses, but AI in its current state would only be better than a terrible boss honestly. A good boss isnt some asshole bossing people around. A good boss is someone who knows how to lead people and get the most out of each constituent part of the team, while also helping each person theyre leading be the best they can be. A good boss is someone who has empathy, but can also be firm when appropriate, and knows how to read people well. A good boss is someone who can successfully plan work in such a way that it is most successful while simultaneously putting the least strain on each member of the team as is possible.
The problem with bosses isnt the concept of bosses. The problem is that there are 10x as many managerial roles as there are people competent and selfless enough to actually do the shit in the previous paragraph. Leadership is a position of service, not self servitude, but 9/10 people use leadership in self interest and, unsurprisingly, fail in the end. They want the check and they want to be the boss so they can put work on others. A truly successful boss can never be someone like that, because no one respects working for someone who asks them to do work that they themselves would never do (unless talking about highly specialized work where few are competent).
No one wants to work the weekend for a manager who always takes it off. Nobody wants to know that they know more about how to do their job than their boss does. All of that kind of stuff eats away at people until they go work for someone else.
I think an AI boss would obviously be better than a bad boss. But it cant replace working for someone that you highly respect and that helps you be the best you can be, which is something that often motivates people to continue working in the same job. AI would be such a neutral force that it couldnt really do that part of the job. And obviously it cant read people
Are there any articles about examples? I only know about aftermath.site but ha e no clue if it is sccessful or not.
Find any video on YouTube about Mondragon in Spain. This is a good one from Dutch broadcaster vpro. It’s like the 9th largest organization in Spain, highly successful in other words. The Marxian economics Professor Richard Wolff gave a ‘Talk at Google’ years ago that is in part about Mondragon. He discusses Mondragon in much of his work in fact.
There is also some academic work that shows that worker coops are more resilient during recessions and, for example, the global financial crisis. Here’s a DW (German) minidoc discussing that fact https://youtu.be/zaJ1hfVPUe8
French glass maker Duralex saved all jobs with workers coop: https://thebetter.news/duralex-cooperative/
Farmers in New Zealand are organized into cooperative, probably the biggest and most successful cooperative there is, and there's almost zero subsidizing from state for them.
Here's a list of a few coops: https://canadianworker.coop/join/members/
The list includes federations of other workers coops, like the Federation of EMT coops: https://fcpq.coop/
load more comments
(6 replies)
It would be the largest cost cutting measure, but the ruling class won't allow it.
Yes. If they did allow it, who would hire their nephew, then?
The fucking irony.
Takes leverage away, it is throwing such a tasty challenge society vice, suck that passive aggressive back stabbing work culture!
This is what I told my bosses when AI first showed up and they called a meeting to discussed how to leverage it.
It's not going to replace me, it's going to replace you.
I think the AI might have too much empathy for the role.
It might even make smarter decisions. The last few companies I worked for had total morons for CEOs, but they sure maximized short-term profit (by burning the company down).
I suspect an AI CEO would be more rational and science driven, instead of believing in some ideology that says workers have to feel desperate to be most productive or something. It's possible they'd look at science and then raise the minimum vacation time so people are more productive and generate more profit.
It would be however the programmer programmed it to think.
They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.
It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times "we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits" but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.
AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn't have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.
More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like "theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates" because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it's rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It's much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn't stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.
It's also possible that they work people until they die, as all the AI from companies communicate and if you get fired from one, you can't get work anymore. People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.
People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.
That's what the AI would call "sustainable business practices"?
Plot twist: board replaces the whole exec layer with CEO AI, keeps the difference, gives nothing to the employees, line goes up, employees now threatened both at the top and the bottom of the ladder, work-work!
When manual workers were replaced by robots, they were told to "retrain and reskill" to get new jobs.
Perhaps these CEO's can retrain to be plumbers, there's good money there.
LOUDER FOR THE ~~PEOPLE~~ CEO’s IN THE BACK!
I for one welcome our new robot overlord.
This is how we get Dalamain.
Delamain has shown me more loyalty and care than 99% of NC. I'm on board.
I mean honestly... delamain was honest. Which absolutely was better than 99% of night city. You get shot? Yeah he won't take you to the hospital if his client paid him to take you to location z, but you knew that before getting in.
You get the creds for the primo package yourself though? You got it made choom.
They use the wrong color though, purple is good. They should be Red.
Does it use AI to generate quotes?
Nevermind, it seems to be using predefined quotes.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›