Executives love AI because they can’t spell automation
What happens when middle management realizes the only jobs AI can actually do is their jobs?
That seems like one of the more reasonable scenarios to expect “AI” to thrive, actually.
You have dozens to thousands of people doing the actual work, then you have one CEO or owner that asks the AI to summarize what all the workers have been doing and communicating. It then presents them with a list of suggested decisions with some metrics tied to them like chance of success and Net Present Value (NPV).
The AI wouldn’t even have to do a good job! It would just have to get things wrong or make up bullshit whole cloth as much as human middle managers, or maybe even less!
I think this is a possiblity not because the AI will do a good job, but because the ONE thing that LLMs seem to be good at is mimicking what a random human might type, including humans who are often ignorant or wrong.
That’s a sharp joke 😅 Sometimes sounding polished and confident gets mistaken for intelligence. Tone can be convincing, even when there’s not much depth behind it.
i wonder how much trouble you’d be in if you hung this at work
Depends on how long it takes for a middle manager to get someone to read it to them (and then explain it).
Claude summarize this meme for me. Explain it like I’m 5.
Usually they forward it to someone to explain, forward the reply to another underling to execute and copy/paste that one’s estimate or status update in the original mail’s relpy.
see that’s why ai is so useful, it saves hours coming up with an explanation and doesn’t even sound exasperated doing it.
well it’s a bit dehumanizing so I guess a fair amount of trouble
Is it possible that the way humanity has been dealing the with useless 1/3 of the population was to put them in middle-management positions? Consultants and the like?
Absolutely it is. Thats where we got the phrase “kicking them upstairs” from. Promote the useless guy to a position where they can’t actually do any damage.
If AI succeeds in replacing a lot of those “positions”, we’re going to face a tsunami of idiots.
Corporate middle managers don’t use semicolons. They don’t even know when to use colons or apostrophes.
They taught AI to talk like HR reps.
Ewww…
It makes sense now. Middle managers are the ones most impressed by AI. They think the AI is sentient because it is just like they are.
