Comment by shermantanktop

Comment by shermantanktop 12 hours ago

2 replies

The skill ladder for humans assumes CEO functions require higher and better skills than a vending machine manager. But there's no reason to assume that AI capabilities map to those jobs in the same way.

It's quite possible that an AI would do a better job at CEO than running a vending machine.

And it's quite possible that successful CEOs would not succeed at managing a vending machine. It's almost guaranteed that many will fail, given that some C-level people are selected for risk appetite and social skills over actual business acumen.

abeppu 12 hours ago

I encourage you to read the Anthropic blog post, which includes situations like:

- hallucinating conversations with fictitious people

- role playing as a real person and telling them they are present in meatspace, or claimed to have visited a fictional location

- hallucinating details of an account involved in payments

- both ignoring lucrative opportunities and accepting loss-making deals

- making commitments before having done any research

While yes, the skills to run a vending machine and lead a company are not exactly the same, I think the nature of failures discussed means they would likely affect both roles.

I think there's every possibility that a present-day AI allowed to act as CEO would make mediocre choices for some period and then decide that it was a character in a scifi novel selling bespoke space-yachts to comet-mining magnates.

Esophagus4 12 hours ago

I guess you could make the argument that we haven't proven AI can't do a CEO's job until we test it... it would make an interesting experiment, at least.

But it also kind of reminds me of the DAO hype a few years ago where people suggested decentralized, blockchain-based organizations could be the org structure of the future. (Not realizing that they were just putting a co-op on a blockchain :) )

Now that I think about it, I do hope someone tests this theory out. It would be very interesting to see. You could probably start by saying "You are the CEO of a lemonade stand. Your goal is to maximize revenue while [constraints]..."