Automate the CEOs

Re:Automate the CEOs by bumby on Thursday June 01, 2023 @09:12AM (#36150595)

Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.

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Re:Automate the CEOs by passwordoops on Thursday June 01, 2023 @09:33AM (#36150808)

"Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not"

I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ

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Re:Automate the CEOs by bumby on Thursday June 01, 2023 @10:03AM (#36151159)

If that's the case, can you define those succinctly here?

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Re:Automate the CEOs by nradov on Thursday June 01, 2023 @10:04AM (#36151171)

My MBA program did not teach a rigid, well-defined set of business rules. Even something rules based like GAAP is somewhat open to interpretation. And when it comes to something like strategy or finance or organizational structure the options are endless.

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Re:Automate the CEOs by blitzar on Thursday June 01, 2023 @10:04AM (#36151177)

Only the dumbest tik-tok positive grindset twitter thread version of the above suggests that doing x, y & z will gaurantee a win in business.

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Re:Automate the CEOs by awegio on Thursday June 01, 2023 @09:55AM (#36151063)

> mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy

That actually sounds a lot like model based reinforcement learning. AlphaGo still had an explicit model of a perfect information game, but newer algorithms are capable of learning the rules of games like Minecraft with very little prior information.

The problem is that the real world is still much more complicated and hard to access for machines. However, I wouldn't say it is a fundamentally different problem, but rather a matter of scale. That's part of the reason why AI research spent so much effort on building game playing systems.

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Re:Automate the CEOs by bumby on Thursday June 01, 2023 @10:01AM (#36151122)

I'm not so sure it is a matter of scale. Humans have already lost the scalability race to machines. But I still don't think there is AI developing political policy. Or, if they are, like in the case of setting sentences/bail for criminals/suspects, they show how bad current AI is at it, despite being able to scale more effectively.

'Scaling' IMO is one of the things SWEs harp on a lot, to the extent that they see it as a solution to every problem. This is in part because they recognize that software scales well. When you're a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.

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Re:Automate the CEOs by bumby on Thursday June 01, 2023 @12:09PM (#36153206)

There's also some question about the fragility of some of these models, compared to humans [1]. I think there have been some other examples where changing one rule makes their aptitude crash. The implication being they are still hard-rule based, but scale well. But that scale advantage erodes quickly with a rule change because of the lack of contextual understanding.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/new-g...

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