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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)
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.
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)
Who's going to make all the insider trading/leaks, illegal dumping and shredding of disliked health/safety reports? Not to mention...
A robo-ceo would be be ideal for all of these!
insider trading/leaks = hack and data breaches
illegal dumping and shredding of disliked reports = disk/storage failures
Didn't have the right backups in place? Oh, the CEOBOT cut that from the budget to maximize blah blah blah market speak. Can't blame him for a hardware failure.
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
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.
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.
What job? Golf? Lunch with other executives? The CEO is a few executive levels away from being someone who does anything other than ask their minions for their problems and then turn around and ask them to provide the solution which they in turn rubber stamp. You could chop all these and have the last group form a council and eliminate the executive level entirely.
Of course shareholders don't like this. People who actually do something at an organization tend to want to actually focus on improving the organization and its operations and shareholders want you to make the bad decisions that will result in a better earnings report this quarter and to hell with the next ten years.
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.
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.
This will only happen when they can make robots powered by cocaine.
ralphbarbagallo.com
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
The rich generally have a small income. When you are talking about the top 1% in income, usually it is doctors and lawyers you are talking about, not the idle rich like Trump.
If you want to slam the rich, you would have to tax all forms of saving, which will hurt the middle class and rich equally. You have to tax stocks, savings accounts, 401k, and wherever else the rich people store their money and invest. Taxing income always hurts those who work hard and make a lot of money, not the people who are truly rich and rarely do any work.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Those aren't CEOs those are people who founded and own their company and might happen to keep a CEO title. They can't even be fired they would have to fire themselves (though Gates did). That is an entirely different game than your typical scenario where the original people are outed in by the venture capital firm that ends up owning the company or what comes later when the board hires some Harvard blueblood MBA CEO.
Probably doesn't hurt to point out that while successful at making money, they are also generally terrible people for their industries. Gates and Ellison set back technology for at least 20 years (we are still running inferior tech because of their business success). Packard notoriously produced some of the worst technology in the sector with technicians dreading seeing one of the products produced under him and heart broken consumers discovering they'd bought the machine you couldn't upgrade. Jobs booted the actual brains behind the technology and ran Apple from producing advanced systems that rivaled the Amiga into being overpriced commodity crap that came in fancy packages and lots of color choices. Woz might have been lousy at business but he was the brains behind everything worthwhile at Apple.
Numbers don't prove that products aren't shitty, they prove they are popular which has very little relation to function. In tech and really STEM as a whole function is the only factor in whether or not something is shitty. It is common to see the best solution go under. Commodore produced far superior products to IBM and Apple but they went under. Convincing idiots your inferior product is trendy and cool will get you the numbers but doesn't make it even the slightest bit more or less shitty.
People would be much better off without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs deluding them into thinking they shouldn't be paying qualified engineers to both choose their technology and manage it for them. Just because wire is relatively simple to run and an outlet is easy to wire up does not mean you aren't an idiot if you are doing it yourself rather than hiring an electrician and neither does everything turning out fine 99 times out of a hundred when you do. Eventually that under spec'd wire you chose, that 10a outlet connected to a 20a breaker, that aluminum junction you used to splice it, or the location you ran it being a fire hazard in the attic is going to burn someone.
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..