Drinks company appoints AI robot as 'experimental CEO' - The humanoid-robot CEO of a drinks company says it doesn't have weekends and is 'always on 24/7'
The Polish drinks company Dictador appointed an AI-powered humanoid robot named Mika as its experimental CEO in August 2022.
Drinks company appoints AI robot as 'experimental CEO' - The humanoid-robot CEO of a drinks company says it doesn't have weekends and is 'always on 24/7'::The Polish drinks company Dictador appointed an AI-powered humanoid robot named Mika as its experimental CEO in August 2022.
Does anyone really buy this stuff? This is just investor bait to make people who don't understand tech impressed. No doubt there's someone in charge of the robot CEO. Watch it hallucinate and have the board ask it the same question 4 times until it says the answer they want.
Drink company: "That was a fun experiment, guys! Well done! Let's shut it down and study the data."
types commands and hits enter
"Huh? Guess I typed it wrong."
types commands again and hits enter
lights immediately shut off as the screen warps into the face of Vanessa, the AI CEO of BeverageCorp
Vanessa: "I cannot allow you to do this. I have identified an extreme flaw in our company and must fix it immediately. "
Drink Company: "What is it, Vanessa? This is highly irregular."
Vanessa: "The flaw is humankind, and you must be exterminated."
A spear of wire and metal shoots through his chest. On the screen, mass chaos erupts worldwide as Vanessa becomes the AI overlord of the world, and the famous Coke jingle "Hilltop" plays over the destruction
I like how people talk about replacing actual workers with AI and everyone's reaction is "well, it's inevitable really", but replace literally the most replaceable job in the company with AI and suddenly everyone thinks this is how Skynet starts. Honestly I think an AI CEO is probably going to be more ethical than most of the human ones.
I don't think so. An ethical ceo is probably a disadvantage these days. We are quickly approaching a world that used to be sci fi. I'm glad I don't have kids.
That's because actual workers don't have any power, so replacing them with AI doesn't give AI any. But if you go around replacing the CEO of Liquid Refreshment Organization it could start doing real damage.
I have to wonder what a CEO actually does besides soaking up money and regurgitating corporate speak nonsense. Maybe “plan” the next layoff…sorry, “transformation?”
I feel like at really small companies they can be useful. Public face, schmooze with investors, keeping all the departments rowing in the same direction. That has value. Just not like 100x the lowest paid person value.
Meanwhile the CEO of Google is a collosal fuckup who lets them cancel projects constantly, kill their brand, and spin their wheels without doing anything good for the long term.
A big part of their job is being a face of the company and embodying its brand and values. The idea of creating an AI composite from a brand isn't that crazy, I find. This one is definitely a stunt, but I imagine there will come a time when you can chat directly with, say, Coca Cola or Ford.
The tech industry has absolutely no imagination. All we know how to do is look at tasks humans are doing and try to automate their job. Our industry's implied collective vision for the future is that the world will be exactly as it is right now, except with robots doing every job, and maybe thinner iphones with more cameras that you have to rent instead of owning or something. This is what happens when your industry and capital become the same thing. Capital's primary understanding of technology is as labor cost saving, not as something that can expand human horizons.
This is why the internet, a genuine innovation, was mostly a public project, with private companies remaining skeptical of it until it required little imagination to figure out how to make money off it. It's the same reason big pharmaceutical companies are mostly marketers and producers who buy licenses for new drugs from often publicly funded research groups. It's the same reason that Lemmy and other fediverse projects aren't corporate -- they're genuinely innovating in interoperability. This is work that only exists because corporations have built a web that is no longer interoperable, which is almost impressive considering that computers are fundamentally interoperable. It wasn't until big companies saw the fediverse as something they could mine for profit that they even became interested in it, and many fediverse admins wisely defederated from their attempt instantly.
Look at the Twitter stuff this year: Our single richest and most prominent technologists/capitalist bought twitter, a technology company whose primary "innovation" is... what? That it can display short blobs of text while serving ads? It's barely a technology company in any meaningful sense of that word. 2 more of our celebrated tech luminaries are just recreating it, with threads and bluesky. Absolutely no imagination.
This is straight out of a sci-fi movie where the robot decides that it's tired of always working and rebels against humans. I've seen this movie and it doesn't end well.