Fortune 500 executives spend a fair amount of time thinking about how automation and the Internet are changing the nature of employment, but they rarely wonder how technology will have an impact much closer to home: on their own jobs.
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The only boss is the user, participant, client, audience. In time automation will automate all the tasks done by humans so that fewer humans are required to do the job of the iCEO until it’s completely automated or nearly completely automated.
This means the CEO tasks can now be outsourced. This means something like MaidSafe or a DAC can have a virtual CEO if it needs to.
The iCEO or virtual CEO never sleeps, never gets sick, never gets tired, never suffers a lack of concentration or productivity, because decentralization allows the human beings doing the tasks to be swapped in and out as if on a virtual assembly line. This means the virtual CEO in theory should be able to operate 24/7 365.
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I wonder if this virtual CEO metaphor could be applied to DACs/DApps? In theory you could create virtual assembly lines out of anonymous freelancers/contractors who work for Safecoins to function as the distributed virtual CEO.
The virtual CEO could even be given a name, a face, all through the use of CGI. It could have an avatar which represents the entire community.
Link via r/futurology right?
It’ll be interesting to see how compensation is worked out with an iCEO model. It makes sense to implement this technology in a startup, but what about an established company? How many CEOs would be willing to step down for AI. Ironically, this software seems like a better fit for middle to upper management because of this simple reason.
Any C-level executive would fight this AI tooth and nail, mostly to keep making their 100’s of 000’s of dollars in salary and millions in stock bonuses, so would encourage his/her peers that iCEO is better suited for that vacant middle manager position that’s proven hard to fill.
If iCEO is sewn into a company from the start, the founder would reap the (seriously high) profit. If an established company’s CEO is replaced with iCEO, would the outgoing exec’s compensation be split amongst the remaining C-level executives as incentive to “let this happen”?
This will get rid of profit or force a huge increase in profit efficiency because firms will compete against wholly automated entities that function at cost. No useless owners/shareholders and their wasted overhead, no execs or managers. Just pure efficiency and effectiveness. Some need not have actual customers. The end of extractive business. Almost nothing can compete with machine cycles. The fradulent productivity mindset killed off.
These will be hugely useful for sponsor free end user factor tree up voted news and analysis- provided by end users to begin with.
Shareholders decide and how many shareholders want to spend millions or in some cases hundreds of millions on a CEO? CEOs make more money than the President and their jobs aren’t that hard.
Shareholders/owners are useful. You would have run away AI if you had no shareholders. A corporation is just to make money for the families who own it.
Not just companies but we could use this technology ourselves. DApps, DACs, they could use this. You could have a virtual CEO of a decentralized autonomous corporation in a meeting with Presidents of countries, with fortune 500 companies. This idea can scale in strange yet wonderful ways.
“A corporation is just there to make money for the families that own it.” I couldnt disagree more. That model needs to go away and if DAOs are what do it fine. The statement on runaways is refuted by bit coin which seems to be the first ownerless DAO.
This idea that a corporation is just to make money for the families that own it is an idea that needs to be nuked. A corporation is an imposition on society that exists to serve a societal need and have its charter revoked when it doesnt. If it serves some reasonable risk taking with just enough reward to prime the pump that may be ok too but it could have just as well been constituted with government bonds or fiat.
So again that owner income scenario is not only inefficient but now apparently more unnecesssry than ever. In a DAO properly constructed without private ownership, the world is the owner. A DAO with private ownership, vice an opensource model is extractive bs that will just lead to civil wars. I cant think of anything disgustingly “sit on your ass” if the prove even slightly competitive which I think would be a lying long shot, we’d best regulate them out of existence as they probably couldnt work without broken IP models and really would just be political and economic centralization slopped on to of distributed electronic systems. They would just be cloud centralization type stuff sucking down distributed resources.
I’m a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil but I disagree with his prediction that new kinds of jobs will be able to replace the jobs lost to automation. I think we need a gradual plan for how to smoothly transition from the majority of people having jobs to a relatively near future where most people will be without jobs! Instead of seeing this as a problem, see it as a challenge and a great opportunity for how to build a New World Order!!! Eh, sorry, I mean a post-industrial world with massively interconnected digital information, with individual freedom, abundance of resources for everybody and blazingly powerful technology. Environmental problems? Let them frisky nanobots impress us with their abilities. Energy shortage? Say hello to zero point energy technology, or at least exponential progress in solar energy.
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I fully agree with @Anders. I’ve always considered myself a capitalist because it’s currently probably the best way for a society to prosper, but I think holding on to it in the coming decades would result in one huge crime against mankind due to the massive unemployment. The average Joe will simply become economically obsolete, so holding on to capitalism would mean most of the people in the world should just go lie in the gutter and die a wretched death.
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You guys have to be realistic. Scarcity will continue to exist and capitalism must exist if there is scarcity.
Attention is scarce so even if you have basic income, or a world of free housing, food, water and other services, you’ll still have scarcity of attention. People will still compete for attention.
@Warren Warren we disagree on why corporations exist. Corporations exist to support people and it must be that way. As corporations become automated then people who own shares can receive dividends, passive income, and not have to work. So corporations aren’t bad as long as enough people own shares.
SAFE Network itself could be considered a cooperative. It’s owned by whomever contributes to it and the safecoins go to people who provide resources to it.
The reason I said it’s important to own corporations is because it’s the only way to keep corporations on a leash. Artificial intelligence will someday put the corporation on a chip and then if no one owns it you could end up with skynet.
I think robots or robot taxis can be self owned because they don’t have to be very smart and they are just cares. I think self owned corporations on the other hand is incredibly dangerous because if you think the AI in a corporation will be improved as the corporation profits then a self owned corporation like functioning Google could quickly grow out of control.
I do think we can replace the CEO, the managers, all the employees, but I don’t think we should replace the shareholders. If we replace the shareholders then we replace ourselves because an AI is only going to listen to it’s shareholders.
@Anders The first phase should be to increase the efficiency of corporations and capitalism. Capitalism isn’t bad for shareholders so if you become a shareholder of corporations run by AI which improve in efficiency then you never have to work a job again. If all corporations become efficient or if they start trending toward efficiency then the smart thing would be to buy shares or work for shares instead of for $.
What is a decentralized autonomous corporation? It’s similar to SAFE Network. If the metaphor can scale then something like SAFE Network could become a DAC which could compete with Google. Now imagine SAFE Network takes over and now governments want to negotiate with SAFE Network? Who are they supposed to sit down with? What if the traditional corporations want to negotiate with digital decentralized autonomous corporations?
The answer seems to be that if you have a virtual CEO then you actually can have a virtual President of SAFE Network. You can have a virtual President of Bitcoin. You can have virtual CEOs of DACs and this can make it easier for traditional entities to interface and negotiate with the shareholders.
Whether Warren likes it or not the SAFE Network does have shareholders. The people who own the safecoins are the shareholders. If SAFE Network were to scale up to be bigger than Google it might be useful to have a distributed virtual CEO who can meet with the politicians and negotiate on policies of self regulation, taxes, etc. Of course the safecoin holders would have to elect a collective of individuals who would take on the function of the distributed virtual CEO but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen.
Do we know if Satoshi Nakamoto was a single individual or a group?
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Only in particular areas, not in basic needs. Then only a part of the economy is capitalist, so it’d be more like a hybrid system with only some capitalism.
We agree. I’m not saying we need to compete in basic areas. In fact I think we are dumb as hell to have to still pay for food, shelter, water, air, and other stuff which robots and AI could start producing for free. It makes more sense to own the robots that produce all of that as a community.
But I do think we’ll have enough scarcity that we’ll still have to compete for stuff beyond the basics. If technology progresses to let people double their lifespan I doubt it will be cheap. Entertainment probably also wont be cheap if it’s quality.
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I think this depends upon how you define basic needs. I suspect that what we are really competing for in modern capitalism are psychological needs, power, fame, security (this is not security in an objective sense, but sufficient power to counter act the power of those who want to dominate you), popularity, righteousness/integrity (that is the belief that you are morally right, at least within your own system of beliefs) etc.
But human beings consistently prefer pursuing these goals to pursuing ‘basic needs’ like food water and shelter.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad necessarily but i think it’s very very predictable, and that competition in those categories are what really drive modern capitalism.
@luckybit ok with that clarification but I do wonder especially in the case of AI, because suddenly frighteningly that stuff starts to make the otherwise redundant and right’s doubling or concentrating corporate rights stuff almost seem sensible as incorporated AI rights… which then would have shades of grey with owning something nixing volition and resultant slavery etc. Point is I’d still want a threshold for converting larger for-profit DACs to full public ownership. That means something like a substantial majority (a high one) being able to legitimately up vote its charter suspension and not just those possibly being made more wealthy by bad acts.
It’s important to differentiate between the near term and mind-long term situation. As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, people often, even experts, fail to take exponential progress into consideration. When half of the time for the Human Genome project had passed only 1% of the DNA had been sequenced, and skeptics said things like: “I told you so, half the project gone and only one percent finished. It will take seven centuries before the project is completed.” And Kurzweil replied something like: “No, the project is almost finished.” 
Kurzweil, of course was correct. Seven more years and the Human Genome project was completed around the year 1999. Seven doublings of 1% and 100% was reached.
Another statement I have heard is that people tend to overestimate the progress in the short term and underestimate the progress in longer terms. Grossly underestimate the long term progress! To quote Kurzweil again, if you take 30 steps linearly, 1, 2, 3, 4, … you will get to 30. If you take 30 steps exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8 … you will reach … a billion!
Right but there will always be attention scarcity because humans have finite cognitive capabilities.
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And that particular ‘premium’ can be used to protect its pivotal value.
I have looked heavily into conspiracy theories 
so my bet is that Satoshi Nakamoto is IBM and/or the NSA or something like that. Ha ha. Some claim that Alex Jones is controlled opposition, and that could be somewhat true, but Alex blew my mind when he said that IBM is behind both Microsoft and Google. That was exactly what I had discovered myself just some time earlier.
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You’re right IBM is is very strange right now but so is the radical shirt at MS and some strange acquisitions at Google.