[ryandrake]

It seems like the Holy Grail here has become: "A business is one person, the CEO, sitting at his desk doing deals and directing virtual and physical agents to do accounting, run factories, manage R&D, run marketing campaigns, everything." That's it. A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer, and a big AI/robotics bill = every business. No pesky employees to pay. That's the ultimate end game here, that's what these guys want. Is that what we want?

[ModernMech]

Keep going, the end end goal is that even the customers are AI. And the company doesn't sell anything or do anything, it just trades NFTs and stocks and digital goods. And the money isn't real, it's all crypto. This is the ideal, to create nothing, to sell nothing to no one, and for somehow that to mean you created "value" to society and therefore should be rewarded in material terms. And greatly at that, the people setting all this up expect to be at the tippy top of the social ladder for this "contribution".

This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.

[wolvesechoes]

"This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion"

This.

I am amazed that people usually are blind to this trajectory.

[crazylogger]

Surely at that point the CEO would be AI as well.

The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.

I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.

People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.

[brigandish]

When it can come up with something new, then I might be with you.

[cheema33]

> A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer...

Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.

[atonse]

Yup I have said for the past year to anyone that'll listen, that the concept of hourly (white collar) work will go away.

And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.

Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).

I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.

But I know I'm probably in the minority.

[jiriknesl]

If this happens, everyone is his personal CEO from that moment on.

Yes, I want it. It would 100* our GDP, and make people significantly more independent.

Mix it with open source unbiased AI, living on a land large enough to feed you and your family, and cheap energy, and utopia is here.