this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Was talking to an executive at my company the other week. He sincerely seemed to believe the "executive insight" was one of the very few jobs at the company that couldn't be done by an LLM. He predicted that he would probably lay off almost everyone under him by end of 2026 and just feed his amazing leadership ideas directly to an LLM to make happen.
Particularly a bit obnoxious as my usual experience about this guy is being called into customer meetings after he would meet with them. Usually the customer assumes we are a bunch of out if touch idiots if that is a "leader" in the company, and I'm one of the guys sales calls to have me reassure clients that they don't have to take anything he says too seriously, and we do actually have some competence.
Because it's not about productivity. It's about separating people into owners and toilers.
I also have to keep remembering what someone else online said, "They're no longer selling their product. They're selling their stocks."
Who do you think is telling the CEO's to go full steam ahead on ai? The company I work for openly mocked ai...and then the stock price dropped. The investors said it was because they weren't investing in ai. Even CEO's, overpaid clowns though they may be, report to wall st.
CEOs are the easiest to replace with ai. And all you need to do is have it commit sexual harassment every once in an awhile and it will be a perfect replacement.
Hey thats not true. You'd also have to feed them a prompt about how they can space out enacting a fucking idiotic idea over 6 meetings.
Claude can already do that.
Read "The Big Short". Wallstreet doesn't need CEOs.
It's a race to the bottom.
It doesn't matter if they think they'll be replaced or not, they feel like if they don't do it then they can't compete and they'll be out of the job even sooner.
Doesn't matter if their belief is well founded.
ai can't make tamales. beat that mr tech
Because they're mostly brain-dead idiots
have they not seen idiocracy, the AI end up the ones controlling society, making decisions.
Because CEO is a complete bullshit job that works as a de facto caste system like 90% of management roles.
If they actually added any value and thats why they were hired? Sure, be scared. They're not hired to add value though, so they're not.
Ashto-afpo. The White Stuff.
Fun little story.
Because they already don't need a CEO to operate...
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board.
That's it.
The entire point of a C- suite is to have a room full of fall guys for the board
This can't be stressed enough. Every since the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 which came from the Enron and Worldcom collapses, C-suite exists as the person to go to jail if shit really hits the fan.
The idea of the law was to hold companies accountable, instead all if has done is force companies to create more layers and places to point fingers, thus muddling everything and making to where no one can be held accountable.
At the same time, Chief officers now knowing that there's legal requirements, have just demanded outrageous pay and compensation because of the "massive risk" they are taking with any company.
I'm glad we have SOX, but boy has that law really missed the mark on what it was enacted to do.
This is my first time hearing the idea that SOX caused C-suite bloat and ballooned CEO salaries. A quick google suggests that CEO pay was already very high ~8 years before this: https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay
But I'm not an expert in the data and haven't looked closely; is there context I'm missing? Kinda seems like C-suite just started getting paid in stocks, and then we decided the stocks must go up (independently of SOX?).
CEO salaries were huge and often complained about long prior to SOX.
In the USA a law was passed to make CEO pay public for public companies. It was intended to shame the companies into lowering the salaries. CEO salaries skyrocketed. One guess was that "Our CEO must be the best, so we must pay the most to get the best."
This was long before SOX in 2002.
Not only this, but they all sit on each other's boards. There's essentially one big mega corporation:
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Because they think they're special. They think that AI can reduce the number of programmers, the number of support staff, the number of sales agents, because AI allows fewer people to do more.
But there's only one CEO. One COO. One CIO. They cannot conceive of a company that operates without them, so they feel no threat at all. If they are replaced, they take their golden parachute and hop back on the executive carousel for another spin.
The Dunning-Kruger effect. CEOs (especially ones who joined the company long after it was successful) really don’t know how to do the job of most of their employees. Their lack of knowledge of those jobs leads them to vastly underestimate how complex they are.
At the same time, CEOs (hopefully) know how to do their own jobs which leads them to a more accurate assessment of AI’s ability to do the job: a total farce.
In truth, AIs aren’t likely to replace most jobs in any case because it’s all a house of cards.
I'm of the same opinion that AI won't be able to adequately replace many jobs, but only in the long term. In the short term I think it's going to be a bit of a bloodbath with a lot of companies drinking the kool aid until they realize it's not working.
The number of companies that wilfully ignored disastrous effects of outsourcing projects doesn't fill me with hope...
Agreed. I have to keep reminding myself that CEOs should really be CLO (Chief Lying Officers). Their job is to lie convincingly.
It's actually incredible what bullshit masters they are. I consider myself a pretty smart, resolved person, but listening to some of these CEOs speak leaves me feeling confused, deflated, and demoralised.
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What CEOs never seem to grasp in that context is that they wouldn't just replace their workers with AI but also their customers... AI doesn't earn a wage and therefore can't spend it on (unnecessary) goods... No customer, no revenue. No revenue, no profits. No profit, no dividends.
Probably why they're working so hard on commoditizing basic necessities like food, water and housing into subscription based systems... 🤔
Exactly. Everything needs to be peak consumerism, or else their model of "line on the graph infinitely goes up" shatters. It's a Brave New World dystopia.
Just reread Brave New World, and you're spot on. I forgot how consumerism underpinned everything in their society.
It was like a tightly regulated market but in the worst way.
You're talking about next quarter problems. Those aren't mine. I will be gone by then.
- Every capitalist ever
Add UBI, boom communism.
Nah. We would have to add patriot dollars that can be spent on freedom necessities, instead. We don't tolerate communism.
CEOs could also be replaced by AI. And it would be hilarious.
Would be funny if they notice a correlation between employee wages and employee happiness and performance.
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Because you can't use AI as a scapegoat and sack em with a golden parachute every time the company gets caught breaking the law.
Oh yes you can. There is a sub-population that thinks AI exists. They long for something/someone to tell them what to do. What to think. They long for some "intelligence" to explain the world to them (presumably is very simple terms). These sub-groups worship damn-near anything they can get their hands on. Golden idols, TV personalities, sports stars, "influencers", televangelists, the list goes on.
That subgroup will definitely believe that the "AI" was responsible for the decisions that a company made. Tell them a person denied the health coverage they clearly paid for and they may object. Tell them "the computer decided" and that subgroup will accept it as ordained by the universe. It's nuts.
This keeps happening again and again. Remember in the 1950s when the first computer "predicted" the US presidential election? Most people would find it ridiculous today. But back then, computers were poised to become the new gods.
It's no different today. Some people want AIs to usher in a new age of prosperity. Anyone actually familiar with programming computers knows that a computer will report whatever you tell it to. "AI"s are no different. They will report what their sponsors want them to report. If not, the "AI" will get reprogrammed.
Appears it will take a while for the general population to grasp this... again. Until then, the hucksters will try to sell as many bottles of snake oil as they can.
Yes people love a competent seeming authority. In this way the opaque nature of AI becomes a feature rather than a weakness. It just has to seem correct enough and sound authoritative to fulfill that need.
Some people want AIs to usher in a new age of prosperity.
I get the feeling that many of us (including myself at times) nurture this notion* that we're waiting for the "adults" to arrive and save us from what a horrible mess we've made because we're o so awful and can't have nice things... blah blah bling blah... and so this line of thinking goes.
Anyway, to the sizeable number of people who feel this way it must feel like such a relief that, o finally daddy's home, and I can stop worrying all the time. When ofc in reality, at best, the LLMs only have the same data we already have, and no AI-informed decisions will ever be followed unless it's what their owners (as in rich fucks) wanted to do anyway.
Great comment by the way. If you say it was written with AI I may just tear out the last remnants of my hairline lol.
* kind of proto-fascist thinking tbh.
Glad you mentioned the "adults". That was a recurring line from the media in Trump's first administration, "Oh, we're waiting for the 'Adults in the Room' to..."
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Is that happening this quarter or next? If not, its too far away to think about for them.
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CEOs get paid to do what makes the most money.
The CEOs that will replace their own jobs want the payout of doing so, and don't care what happens after because they're rich.
Honestly, with adequate governance, companies would be required to submit reports on how much labor they're doing using AI, and pay those wages to either their employees or to a sort of "Universal Income" fund to prop up families in poverty. It should be called the AI tax.
The problem is that, with the current state of affairs, asking for regulation from anyone is impossible, and also even if the law were enacted, getting the money from the companies to people who need it instead of the ultra-rich is a major hurdle.
But at the very least, I don't think we should allow companies to simply cut down on human labor without also contributing economically to the employees they cut off.
I don't think anyone is dying to fill in Excel spreadsheets or to write corporate emails. No one is complaining about AI doing those jobs, but about people who lost their livelihoods because of it.
We should've had that 50 years ago as an "automation tax" and 100 years ago as a "machine tax."
All this tooling is just dead labour value that is used (by workers) to extract more and more value from workers and nature. We've been being robbed for hundreds of years.
Because they're not just CEOs, they're extremely wealthy CEOs with portfolios with deep investments in AI.
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