"The rapid adoption of AI is being undertaken with a view to hiding its true tendency, in an attempt to extend control over middle management, drawing the line of proletarianization somewhere just below the C-suite, or just below the VP floor.
But capitalism has a way of rejecting such policy proposals, as Morozov’s critique of Benanav shows. I do not think that there is any necessity to what is clearly thinkable now, namely an experiment like Project Vend resulting in shareholders forcing a corporation to vacate the CEO position entirely, creating a figure like the NFL’s Roger Goodell, a kind of commissioner who is a politician rather than a manager—a glorified version of the CVS employee with the bank of automatic checkout stations. We seem to be experiencing a form of class warfare, however, that is based on that thinkable future. Neither policy proposals nor experiments will determine the outcome of that war.
There is a silver lining. Where the blood of millions of workers had to be spilt in factories and on picket lines a century ago, at least some of the bizarre class warfare of the AI age is today taken over by machines. The logical tendency to automate decisions creates a hallucinatory wealth class. Maybe what “generative AI” generates is a kind of dementia among those who hold the greatest power in our society. This would explain why the world’s richest men, unable to control the culture that their platforms house, are such patently undignified losers. They are fighting ghosts, afraid of the very machines that “earn” them their wealth. I do not know if the implied automation of the executive has any hope for a socialist future, but at some point, one has to ask if it could really be worse than what we have now. The automation of the C-suite must be tempting to those of us who never believed in the rationality of the managers in the first place."
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/automate-the-c-suite/
#AI #GenerativeAI #CEOs #AIAgents #Automation #Capitalism
