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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."
Read "The Big Short". Wallstreet doesn't need CEOs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're talking about replacing all their workers. The owners will still be ghouls.
Most of the rhetoric we see from businesses and news stations is for the ruling class, not us.
have they not seen idiocracy, the AI end up the ones controlling society, making decisions.
... i dont think you've seen idiocracy.
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.
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.
ai can't make tamales. beat that mr tech
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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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.
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.
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...
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Ironically, the job AI is most suited to replace is the CEO
All it takes is a Python script that replies to every email with some stock phrase like "we must work harder!", "we must trim the fat!", "we must be more innovative!" or some such bullshit. I could write that in half an hour.
In. New logo. Fire 30% of the workforce. Out.
You are now a fully trained management consultant.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
So they’ll keep their jobs. Until the AI decides to get rid of them, too, but they’ll have some CEO hunger games for those who want to be on the AI BOD. Under the control of the AI, of course.
Edit: CEO games like Robocop’s ED-209
If AI shows that the business will be more profitable without a human CEO, the owners will literally just ignore it.
Exactly. I'm sure countless accountants have pointed to that line item before and somehow we still have a CEOs.
People who are so wowed by the incredible generative output of LLMs and can't wait for them to fix things need to realise this technology is not for them.
Like all nee tech it may cause a slight shakeup in the beginning allowing for a little upward mobility, but eventually big business folds around it until it only works for the owners.
We'll all just be working more for less, unless something actually changes.
human CEO, the owners
They are not the same, even in most startups. Bezos and Zuckerberg are an exception. CEOs would be replaced first if possible.
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.
Because they're not just CEOs, they're extremely wealthy CEOs with portfolios with deep investments in AI.
Because current 'ai' can't even run a vending machine business
just because no one needs billionaires doesn't mean we will stop having them
Ashto-afpo. The White Stuff.
Fun little story.
Is that happening this quarter or next? If not, its too far away to think about for them.
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As soon as shareholders, and the board, feel an LLM agent can reliably do all the work of a CEO, the CEO will not need to exist. But the problem is that LLM agents require human supervision or intervention at irregular intervals. Since neither shareholders nor the board work full time, there still has to be someone to supervise and be available. The role of the CEO might change, and LLM agents might end up taking on a lot of the work they do. Maybe someday the CEO will mostly just be an "idea guy" that networks with other similar people to drum up deals and gets the LLM agent unstuck every once in a while. But it's very unlikely there will be no human in the loop during regular work hours.
I'm guessing CEOs will be replaced by their assistants, who will just type questions from the investors into the LLM and post the answers into another chat window.
Because tech bros need more tech bros to laugh from us - people that struggle with more and more meaningless tasks.
There's still a lot of work to do on AI before it's capable of such a highly specialized and demanding job. Training the model to reliably go for strategies of maximum greed and minimum ethics isn't easy.
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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