The Luddite

Before we get started, a quick note: Unionized workers on several of the University of California campuses are on strike, protesting the treatment of the Palestinian solidarity encampments. UC is my biggest client, and we don't cross picket lines here, so if you've ever considered supporting The Luddite, doing so now would be doubly appreciated.

Futurism recently wrote an article titled "CEOs Could Easily Be Replaced With AI, Experts Argue." This isn't the first time that they've put forth these arguments, nor are they the only ones doing so.¹ For obvious reasons, these articles tend to be quite popular. Though they may seem to be on "our side" of the issue, I argue that they're actually taking an anti-labor stance, not an anti-CEO one. Insofar as some of these articles are tongue-in-cheek, at the risk of being no fun, I argue that the joke doesn't quite land because it's too shallow a treatment of its subject matter.²

The first article that I mentioned pretty clearly lays out the motivation:

The idea of subbing bosses for bots is the flipside to all those fears about AI causing widespread job destruction, which often focus on the fact — quite justifiably — that it'll be regular grunts being shown the door in favor of intelligent automation.

"The graveyard is full of indispensable people," as the saying goes. It's very fun to tell CEOs, who might think of themselves as different from us lowly people, that they are, in fact, just as disposable and replaceable. To do this, Futurism (and others) consider the actual work that CEOs do, comparing it to what can be automated:

For the sake of discussion, I'm going to take that number at face value, despite its obviously dubious nature, in part because other articles on the topic, like The Hustle's, make similar claims with more attempted rigor, though I'm skeptical of these for different reasons.² Either way, this is a frequent interpretive error in AI discussions, one that we've covered many times: Percentages in AI tend to get interpreted as grades in a class, and 80% is a pretty good grade, but no one would fly on 80% of an airplane. Jobs are generally more like airplanes than like grades. Anyone who does things knows that the tasks contained within a single job are not uniformly difficult, and most of us really "earn" our pay in what can seem a minute fraction of our job, when we reach the part of the problem that actually requires our expertise. I'm a software developer, and most of my work, say, 80%, could easily be done by someone fresh out of a "learn to code" bootcamp. People pay me to do that ~80% of the work because I can recognize when I've hit that other ~20% and respond accordingly.

In this case, this common misinterpretation, generally used to discipline labor, is ostensibly weaponized against CEOs. This switcheroo necessitates that we think of CEOs just as management does ordinary workers: We look at their tasks, and if we can automate (80% of?) those tasks for cheaper, then we lay them off. Since, as these articles always discuss, CEOs receive exorbitant compensation packages, they argue that they should be replaced as soon as its practical.

The problem is that CEOs are actually not workers, and it's precisely on this very topic that the distinction is most relevant. CEOs are the company's chief executive. That's the top spot, accountable only to the owner(s), which is very often the CEO themselves.³ No one wants to be king because they wish to bury themselves in the daily minutiae of running a kingdom; they bury themselves in the daily minutiae to hold on to the position of king. The point of being in power is to be in power, so as to indulge in its privileges. Chief among those privileges is the power to enrich oneself exploiting other people's labor. CEOs don't get paid outrageous amounts because of their labor in the same way that kings aren't rich because we pay them well to incentivize them to be good kings. Though it seems clever and fun to turn this logic around on the CEO, the person at the top is immune from being replaced using that same logic of exploitation with which they replace those beneath them. By pretending that they too are subject to their own rules, we perpetuate inherently anti-labor logic under a progressive veil, simultaneously disciplining labor while pretending that those in power are, like us, subject to some natural order, rather than the ones exerting political power to impose that very order upon the rest of us.

Any arguments that the CEO's tasks could be automated must acknowledge that they won't be, because the meaningful critique here lies not in the details of management's tasks, but in the double standard: Automation in our economy only ever impoverishes workers and enriches capital, even when the "work" of capital could theoretically be automated. The cure is to make power democratically accountable, not to subject all labor to an automated capitalist dystopia. Instead of using technology to make sure that companies have all the labor that they want for the lowest possible wages, we should use it to make sure that everyone has all that they need for the least possible labor. A robot that can do your job should make your life better, not worse.