> I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation.
To the contrary, I think executives in large companies are far more lucid about how hard it is to effect change than you give them credit for. Of course they can't say that directly because they need to maintain the optics of control for a variety of reason, but in practice CEOs have lots of power but very little control. The levers they have are crude and subject to interpretation of humans up and down the chain. The more ambiguous and dynamic the business environment (eg. consumer tech) the more agency needs to be pushed down and the less specific of policies and procedures can be implemented. Despite all that, setting the culture and vision to get thousands of people rowing more or less in the same direction is important.
My thesis is not that CEOs are highly competent as a group, it's that the problem is hard, and current forms of AI are nowhere close to be able to do anything approaching a better job on a consistent basis. Sure, in practice there are probably some businesses where an AI could outperform a CEO just by luck of the draw, but that's not going to convince owners and boards to swap out human CEOs. Humans can be held accountable and controlled with tried and true techniques of power and capitalism. An AI cannot be understood and manipulated as a human, if it gives owners/directors an answer they don't like, they have no real leverage or recourse. Going back to the engineers—or worse, a third party tech company providing the AI—is not going to work when urgent issues come up.
To the contrary, I think executives in large companies are far more lucid about how hard it is to effect change than you give them credit for. Of course they can't say that directly because they need to maintain the optics of control for a variety of reason, but in practice CEOs have lots of power but very little control. The levers they have are crude and subject to interpretation of humans up and down the chain. The more ambiguous and dynamic the business environment (eg. consumer tech) the more agency needs to be pushed down and the less specific of policies and procedures can be implemented. Despite all that, setting the culture and vision to get thousands of people rowing more or less in the same direction is important.
My thesis is not that CEOs are highly competent as a group, it's that the problem is hard, and current forms of AI are nowhere close to be able to do anything approaching a better job on a consistent basis. Sure, in practice there are probably some businesses where an AI could outperform a CEO just by luck of the draw, but that's not going to convince owners and boards to swap out human CEOs. Humans can be held accountable and controlled with tried and true techniques of power and capitalism. An AI cannot be understood and manipulated as a human, if it gives owners/directors an answer they don't like, they have no real leverage or recourse. Going back to the engineers—or worse, a third party tech company providing the AI—is not going to work when urgent issues come up.