By: Maggie Harrison | Futurism
Automated CEO
To all the CEOs out there who might be interested in — or already are — replacing their employees with autonomous, AI-powered robots: sorry, but as The Hustle reports, the numbers are in… And it looks like it actually makes the most sense to put your job on the proverbial chopping block instead.
And frankly? It makes a lot more sense than you might think.
It’s no secret that chief execs, especially those that helm major companies, make a lot of money, with the average CEO — who might rake in a solid $16-or-so million a year — earning nearly 400 times what the average employee makes, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
And that’s just the average. When it comes to the biggest players in the business, pay ratios are almost cartoonishly skewed.
Here’s one particularly alarming stat: Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy’s 2021 salary, as the Hustle notes, capped out at a staggering $213 million, a number amounting to the collective earnings of 6,474 average Amazon employees.
And look, if someone does a good job, they should get paid well. A lot of CEOs, however, get paid ungodly amounts of cash, even when they do an objectively terrible job. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, for example, raked in $247 million back in 2021 — only to be named the “worst CEO of 2022“ shortly thereafter.
Growth Uber Alles
Which brings us to the real question, here: what is it that we are paying these people for? As the Hustle notes, the primary function of most chief executives, particularly those at long-established firms, is to measure business growth — and the majority of their work, some execs say, can actually be outsourced.
And if that much work can already be outsourced to a human, why not automate those tasks using AI, instead?
Of course, AI bots can’t shmooze on the golf course — at least yet — but as we’ve known since 2014, that part of the job should probably be done away with entirely.
We’re not exactly in favour of any jobs going solely to robots. But considering that most average human underlings are treated like robots by their chief execs already, it only makes sense that CEOs finally meet a similar fate — especially when they’re allocated this much cash, and often have little to show for it.
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