alt Hacker NewsI see this sentiment repeated so often, and its so surprising to me that people have this train of thought.
If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense.
But it isn't. Every one of our jobs exists as a contract that was initially offered by an owner of capital, and created in order to make that person more money.
As such, ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced, because it is the atom from which all the rest of the market's building blocks have been built.
AI could replace every job in the market, and company-owner would be the only job left untouched, because every other job in existence, ultimately, has been created to serve that person, not the other way around.
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Ownership is a little different; there are a lot of jobs in BigCos where they don't own the company but still basically only serve to blather half-truths to the employees.
My dad used to have a boss that he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he felt that the way he spoke was indistinguishable from ChatGPT, and he could be replaced with ChatGPT without anyone noticing a different. This guy wasn't the owner of the company, he was just a higher-level manager.
It's easiest to mental model (for me) that those closest to the money are the last ones out the door. They control the purse strings and what the money is spent on.
So if you are the CEO, you are basically one or two tiers away from the money. Those who report to the CEO 5 levels deep are pretty far away.
Believing that someone very close to the money is going to replace themselves is incredibly naive.
A CEO is an employee just like any other and reports to the shareholders.
It's just that they're typically also a shareholder.
The current structure is just the evolution of Norman lords, only they no longer have to worry about the pesky governing detail and can focus solely on value extraction. But corporate attitude towards humans, both their workers and the 'markets' they extract from, are if anything less humane. The Normans had to have their conquered populations housed, getting married, having kids in order to have workers/something to extract from. Corporate Normanism just throws people away/moves to another group.
>If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense.
How would this even work? "workers compete at their crafts" doesn't put food on the table. I'm sure that if "economics" and "capitalism" wasn't a factor, most of HN would be making indie games or whatever instead of making enterprise SaaS apps.
> ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced
Humans will always be the roots of the ownership graph, but I think AI can be any other node. Start an AI-first hedge fund or private equity firm. The AI makes the decisions. There may be a human manager, but they've agreed to be the AI's arms and ears. AI starts looking like a root owner if/when it starts managing a large charitable endowment, however.
Same thing with managers, particularly CEOs. The board may become dissatisfied with the present CEO, and start requiring that they run all decisions past an AI. The board agrees to certain values or priorities for the AI. Eventually, the AI is the one effectively in control, and the CEO is just a vestigial organ drawing a salary in case the AI ever makes a very bad decision.