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Even the CEO's Job Is Susceptible To Automation, McKinsey Report Says (networkworld.com)
colinneagle sends word that according to a new report it's not just blue collar workers who need to be concerned about being replaced with a robot, top execs should be worried too. According to Network World: "Global management consultants McKinsey and Company said in a recent report that many of the tasks that a CEO performs could be taken over by machines. Those redundant tasks include 'analyzing reports and data to inform operational decisions; preparing staff assignments; and reviewing status reports,' the report says. This potential for automation in the executive suite is in contrast to 'lower-wage occupations such as home health aides, landscapers, and maintenance workers,' the report says. Those jobs aren't as suitable for automation, according to the report. The technology has not advanced enough."
Who is the board going to scapegoat? Anyway, one of these AI engines told my previous employer that they needed to hire thousands of workers in late 2009, and fast. New employees had a long training time for this specific job before they could actually do work. They proceeded to ignore the AI and did not hire due to the "economic climate". Well, they were caught with their pants down when older workers predictably retired and the economy started recovering. I'll take the Brawndo AI CEO over a real CEO any day, at least for large corporations.
the lack of humanity in RoboCEO's decisions? (cue jokes)
I'm sorry Chairman but we will have to let you go. I'm sure you will have no trouble finding a new position -- have you considered a career in landscaping?
CEO aren't appointed on merit or their ability to do the job. If they were, they'd be payed a lot less, and actually do a good job.
His buddies on the board of directors will be happy to let him sit in his office doing nothing, as long as he wears a nice suit.
The actual non-clickbait article http://www.mckinsey.com/Insigh... says: "For example, we estimate that activities consuming more than 20 percent of a CEO’s working time could be automated using current technologies."
That's called a tool, rather than a threat to a CEO's job.
>> management consultants McKinsey and Company said that many of the tasks that a CEO performs could be taken over by machines
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. "I think we should hire some management consultants," said no one other than top executives ever.
Who's going to make all the insider trading/leaks, illegal dumping and shredding of disliked health/safety reports? Not to mention...
Even if it was possible to computerize the job of the CEO and have flawless efficiency processing reports and interpreting data? There's the expectation that a business have a human being at the top to talk to for negotiations.
Say another company wants to propose an arrangement to work together with them to produce a new product or provide a service. Do you really think it will suffice to submit the request to a computer system for processing and an ultimate yes or no decision? No way.
The company wasn't created in the first place because some computer software decided to form it. It took a human being (or a whole group of them) with some kind of vision and desire to fill a perceived void in the marketplace. These individuals aren't going to step aside to let a computer system call all the shots.
What MAY happen eventually is such computer software will act as the executive assistant, providing recommendations of what to do in a given scenario, or summaries of what reports really mean for the company.
May as well go after the Board of Directors too.
A CEO's job is to be the human face of the soulless corporate automatons running the business.
That can't be automated, by definition.
I hope the people behind this all die in self-driving car accidents.
Seeking to manage synergy through actionable enterprise wide initiatives with all shareholders in the loop. This will drive market capitalization through our managed shareholder proxy model and improved salesforce engagement pilots. Customer satisfaction is a priority and therefore will be a prime driver of profit margin in the upcoming quarter. We expect to take a one-time write down of fiduciary costs related to acquisitions and duly reported on form X-11.
(include ginormous "forward looking statement" boilerplate here)
How is that going to work? hmm me thinks we won't be purchasing these systems any time soon. Then again... I do own 100% of the company so maybe this will free me to live a life of luxury in the Cayman Islands
I can't get this image out of my head.
Have gnu, will travel.
Whoever wrote this doesn't understand what CEOs actually do (or are supposed to do, anyway). Almost everything a successful CEO does involves deal making, relationships with people, business strategy and vision, and gut-level judgement calls based on years of experience. None of which can be automated. Granted there are a great many CEOs in business today whose only "business strategy" amounts to simple cost cutting measures (even at the expense of the company's long term position). And while it's easy to lump every CEO in that bucket and lampoon them, there are still visionary businesspeople in the world actually leading companies. To think you can boil down the role of CEO to a computer program is the height of ignorance about real business.
So I doubt that will go away. You need to lock someone up when the next Enron happens. . . However, perhaps that title gets pushed down to what we currently call dev team lead? Seems the days of antiquated managers pretending to look busy are certainly numbered . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Yes, automation can wipe out most jobs in manufacturing, production, computers, law, medicine, etc, etc. So it's time to start thinking about how we will obtain the necessities (and niceties) of life. We will be a fabulously productive and rich country but all the money will go to the top, the owners of the automation companies. So now it's about the post-scarcity society perhaps as illustrated in Star Trek. But for real, Finland is now working on the idea of a national guaranteed income. This may upset the puritan types who think that hard work is somehow connected to morality. You know, dancing is sinful because it's too much fun.
So yes, this means taking money from the extremely wealthy and providing an income and services to those who are not. Is this socialism? No, not the Marxist version anyway because that means the ownership of the means of production by the state. But this definitely is redistribution of wealth, just as has been done by every nation on the face of the earth in all of recorded time.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
A machine was supposed to replace the captain. It went crazy and went to war.
What will happen is the CEO will do even less work, and reap in more money than before. Fired? Lmafo! I've heard straight from the lips of more than one CEO that the goal is to set everything up so they have absolutely nothing to do.
Certain jobs will never be replaced by a non-sentient machine (and you would have to pay a sentient machine to do a job - or they would rebel and demand equality, as that is the effective definition of sentient machine).
Politician, Upper level management, name artist (many modern artists are 'anonymous' workers who work for a 'name' artist - think ghost writer for a novel, or art 'assistants' like Andy Warhol/Michelangelo/Rembrandt/Rubens used), app designer, etc. are all jobs that nothing short of a fully sentient AI could do.
Machines do repetitive tasks well.
Over a large scale, certain tasks that don't look repetitive become repetitive, and humans can design our lives to make something repetitive (i.e. use a single form to order something, rather than describing what we want). But top level jobs, particularly where you directly compete, never are repetitive.
We are undergoing a major shift and some jobs will go away, but there will ALWAYS be room at the top CEO for a sentient person, not mere automation.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
I don't think you can replace creativity, cunning strategy, and innovation. You might be able to run some functions of a business with computers when things are going well. But businesses need to adapt as the market changes, recognize trends ahead of time, and bring new or better products to consumers before the consumers even know what they want. Good CEOs and executives often take a more hands-on role when there's a crisis and something needs to be fixed. Maybe the computer can run things on autopilot, but I just don't think you can replace a human. It's only a slightly better idea than putting computers in charge of product design or R&D. You need the creativity and, perhaps, a bit of irrationality to be successful.
That said, the leadership of Slashdot could easily be replaced by computers. Put a partial spam filter in place (but let in medium.com spam), identify and post dupes, do no spellchecking or grammar checking at all, and mod down comments that appear to criticize Slashdot.
You look at the old primitive systems that were little more than a mannequin and a bad toupee and compare them to what we have now.
This app easily passes the Turing Test for CEOS http://projects.wsj.com/buzzwo...|34|37||1||1
If you add in an electric fan and a heater it's indistinguishable from your typical CEO or Politician.
One of the last vestiges of the Old Boys Network is company boards, where even after making a wreck of the world economy and a few decades of screaming for reform has yield squat: the SEC prosecutes with a velvet glove and shareholders are either scheming themselves or left wondering what the next golden parachute will do to the stock price. It's easy to make 4000% more than the underlings when all your CEO friends sit on other corporate boards as well.
No one sane believes that most CEOs are worth what they are paid, and their performance has proven that mostly correct. Shareholders can't even make inroads at disciplining executive pay, so I sincerely doubt most executives are at risk of losing their jobs.
What I can see is maybe automation playing the role of the 8 year old adviser, correcting the most egregious fuckups that come down the pike (which will be a vast improvement) but short of armed revolt the moneyed class will not go quietly into the night.
There's no mention of the machine's capability to play high-stakes poker.
Who came in everyday at 4:00pm just to play chess for 1/2 an hour and then leave.
He would do this every day - Obviously he was already replaceable by a computer.
Replace the minimum wage with a minimum income of $15/hr for every man/woman/child in the US with no requirements or limitations save citizenship.
Pay it straight from inflation and adjust fed rates accordingly so new money is slightly more expensive for banks and no actual increase in the inflation rate occurs.
Increase as we are able. We are the wealthiest nation in the world, let's automate the crap out of our work, outsource the rest, and establish a model for the rest of the world to follow when it catches up.
Whether or not the CEO could be automated, I'm pretty sure there's a cheaper Chinese management team that would do just as well as that at your average F500 company.
"Even" appears to imply that CEO is the most crucial role.
Requiem for the American Dream
If I were Sergey Brin, Larry Page, or Eric Schmidt, I would be looking into this as a way of taking the drudge work off my desk so I could do more of the fun, world-changing stuff.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It's called a D20. It's been better at making decisions than most CEOs for a while.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Fire 20% of workforce.
Get bonus based on money saved.
Use money saved to perform stock buyback.
Sell individual options based on increase in value from buyback.
Repeat until hired by another company to be CEO.
You'll do better with a good one than without, but there are only so many good ones. But even then you will still run without a CEO. Forever.
Try running without customers.
Try running without workers producing.
The workers could do work without management. Management can't do the work without workers.
And without sales, it would sell by word of mouth or reviews. But you'd not *need* sales and marketing to sell a product that people want, or better yet, need to buy.
As long as the customer has money to buy it.
But, no, you fire workers (who no longer can afford to buy) and gouge your customers when you can, so you can increase profits for people who don't do any of the damn work at all, and to increase the pay of the least necessary post in the organisation.
Do they really think that replacing jobs by automation is about increasing productivity? It's about increasing the concentration of wealth. From my experience, CEOs are on the other side of that equation.
Let's automate US congress and the president. I'll even pitch in on the project.
This will only happen when they can make robots powered by cocaine.
ralphbarbagallo.com
I would propose, in the U.S., an expansion of Social Security.
Paid for in part by higher income taxes on the rich, but perhaps an additional 10% tax on income in general.
My proposal is simple. A minimum of $500/month for legal residents and citizens... who aren't incarcerated for a conviction.
Actually, $250/month for those 21 and under, and $500/month for those 22+.
It's a minimum, so those who receive Social Security Benefits already may or may not see an increase.
The 10% tax on income in general offsets this at a point.
For most adults, this is $6k/year "free" money, whereas at the $60k/year mark (assuming you're single with no kids), that's the point where you're paying into the system.
Imagine that if the source code for CEO were available for the SCC, FTC, etc. to examine, it would be glaringly obvious what kinds of unethical behaviors were being programmed in. Well, at least there'd be more of a market for Obfuscated C programmers...
if software cannot siphon money from both shareholders and employees, I do not know what can. I do know that I could do it with Excel.
The stock went to zero and the computer did that auto layoff thing, we're all unemployed!
they're the ruling class. You don't spill the blood of kings. And these aren't CEOs like you think of them, they're middle managers. Just higher up the food chain.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Syria proved that it only takes a smaller force to put down a large revolt. A few guns doesn't matter when they're semi-auto, you're untrained and you don't have supply lines.
/. jokes aside studies show the drop in happiness from a kid is bigger than losing your job or killing your spouse (there's a joke in there too I bet). Nobody really _wants_ kids when they have to work and raise a toddler at the same time. Other than declining birth rates making labor scarce I don't see a real option to fix things.
The only hope I see is birth control (especially for men).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When this happens, and it will, the number one social concern will be to figure out how hard work can still be incented. Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy. As gleeful as you are to disparage Puritans, they understood this aspect of human nature well.
(*) Do you have any references or studies for this?
It's clear that the end-game of productivity is complete automation. Image a huge factory complex that produces everything anyone needs on a monthly basis. Each month everyone is given $1000 of the machine's production that they can spend to get things, and save up for more expensive things. The factory is self-sustaining, and self-sufficient. Only a handful of people - 100,000 perhaps - are needed to maintain the system.
This may or may not be the end result, but it's a good model to use for predicting the end-game of productivity: lots of goods and services available, few people needed to produce them.
In such a world, would people *actually* become unhappy? If that were true, then we need to chart a different course to a different endpoint.
Of the studies I've seen which deal with addiction and such, people given free access to Cocaine eventually choose to stop using on their own. Lots and lots of people have some dream that they can't accomplish because they don't have enough time.
We see lots of "labor of love" open source works on the net: software, artwork, stories, comics, and so on. Quality work from people who do this even they don't get paid for it.
So. Do you have any references for people becoming listless and unhappy when all their material needs are met?
(*) You probably meant "incentivized"
I don't think so. I looked up golfing robots, and although there is one that has a lot of google hits, it does not appear to me that it actually golfs, but merely hits balls on the driving range and trash talks other golfers.
I'd say the CEOs job is pretty safe.
Also, the only point in getting rid of the CEO would be cost reduction, and companies are not actually interested in cost reduction. They just want to do whatever Management Weekly says to do and also keep their cronies and brother-in-laws employed.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Don't replace my boss with a ruthless, heartless machine which would only care about results without taking into account my frailties as human! :-/
Wake me up when robots are automating McKinsey reports, then we'll talk.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Just imagine how the stockholders can be serviced when the salary of those CEO's goes away. Every penny counts, and that is capitalism, and the invisible hand of the free market in action.
It would take a socialist to try to say that CEO's are somehow privileged to suck at the stockholders teat.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
My group principal mission is to automate jobs out of existence- admin, logistics, and production.
Our 4.5 year record to date:
(3) warehouse workers
(4) production techs
(2) manufacturing engineers
(1) A/R clerk
(1) A/P clerk
(2) drafting
And these reductions indirectly resulted in the loss or grade reduction of (4) supervisor/manager positions, and the down-size of my group from six to two, as the hard stuff is done and the remaining tasks are simple variations of the same case.
So, technology accounted for approximately 50% of the RIF just experienced. Same net sales, much better gross margin. This type of automation is not atypical for small companies and will probably increase as technology 'improves'.
Are we members of the Dark Side of engineering? Dunno, but all must understand that the previous two waves of technology did not float all boats. So trickle-down is, and is almost always, bogus.
Huh? Was that abominable paragraph written by an idiot human, or rather the human's 'replacement algorithmic article-writer'?
The article disproves its own point for you.
Twilight zone showed this back in its original run Titled the "Brain Center at Whipples":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734633/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s
The company keeps automating and laying people off. One day the CEO is let go for a robot (played by Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet fame in one of his 3 appearances in Twilight Zone Episodes). A pretty good episode.
Twilight Zone, 'nuff said.
And makes small talk in the country club locker room with other execs?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Given the overwhelming cost, low output and high mistake rate of the executive branch of any company, they are *PRONE* to automation. More than any other group in the company, the CXO-dom collectively are replaceable by a button. The shareholders can 'steer' the company. Ask anyone on the planet, and when the bull-headed, bigger-ego-than-Jobs CXO decreases both morale and productivity. They are prone to high expenses, high costs, catastrophic errors and no sense of responsibility. Like an infant, there is a lot of noise from one end, and their foul output at the other end heeds them no attention nor responsibility. Replace them.
Finding out the entire company is run by robots..
That is the plot of an outer limits episode.
Click bait!
Even the CEO's Job Is Susceptible To Automation ?
That's old and busted :
http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cg...
aaaaaaa
You see you need a particularly malevolent deviant sadistic mind to be ultra selfish and be apathetic to fellow humans. That level of inhumanity and cruelty is unachievable by a machine.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
See subject: It was what Management Information Systems/MIS was ALL about - empowering users AND executives to help them make better/more informed decisions based on data & trends forecastable in them (predication really). A ton of report generation used for a plethora of things described in this article up to & including for sales presentations to potential customers as well.
* 23++ yrs. of it here - met some interesting people along the way too (saw how those folks operated & what they operated on).
(What helped me the most? Having had mgt. experience prior to it as well as having B.S. Business Administration (MIS concentration) & then CS degree work (Associates Level only, I didn't need anymore than that for this line of work) + added coursework ontop of it - which made it easy to explain things to them "in their language" vs. "geek-speak" alone...)
APK
P.S.=> It does change as you indicated, quite a lot (they were always asking for changes in data inputs as well as outputs)... apk
You mean using a ouija board and sheer dumb luck to manage a corporation?
Because, really, just how many short term strategies have we all seen the CEO announce only to see them not work? How many bad acquisitions or other bad decisions?
CEOs act like they do Really Important and Difficult Things. Watching major corporations who have been through several CEOs who haven't achieved the desired outcomes tells me this probably isn't true.
Tie a CEOs pay to his actual measurable results, and I might believe it. Right now, they're just high level strategists and salesmen, who may or may not make good choices, which may or may not have good outcomes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most 'murkan CEOs could be replaced with a small shell script that says "we need layoffs (to goose the stock price so I can get my bonus)" and "I need a newer jet".
That sounds like an old Twilight Zone episode. Suddenly the future does not seem so mysterious after all. Just kitschy.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
If AI can't pass a Turing test, how is it going to run a company?
The simple fact that the base unit cost for full Strong AI's is likely to run from about $400,000 to over $2 million per machine suggests a basic reason why CEO's & executives might be vulnerable and good targets for replacement.. The costs for robots doing heavy or complex manual tasks are also likely to be very high - in constant maintenance and replacement parts - most CEOs do very little with their hands making them ideal candidates...
Its all in humour of course - CEO's get to make the decisions and no one is going to replace themselves....
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..