Reminds me of an old joke[0]:

> The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

But really, the reason is that people like Pieter Levels do exist: masters at product vision and marketing. He also happens to be a proficient programmer, but there are probably other versions of him which are not programmers who will find the bar to product easier to meet now.

0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/

And who does he sell his software to? Companies that have only 1 employee, don’t need a lot of user licenses for their employees…

You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI.

That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to "capture" more and more of the value being generated and leaving less and less for their customers, until their customer's full time job is ensuring the AIs are actually generating some value for them and not just the AI owner.

The board (in theory) represents the interests of investors, and even with all of the other duties of a CEO stripped away, they will want a ringable neck / PR mouthpiece / fall guy for strategic missteps or publicly unpopular moves by the company. The managerial equivalent of having your hands on the driving wheel of a self-driving car.

All of us are a CEO by that point.

As Steinbeck is often slightly misquoted:

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Same deal here, but everyone imagines themselves as the billionaire CEO in charge of the perfectly compliant and effective AI.

For the network.