{"id":7909,"date":"2017-06-21T11:11:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T15:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7909"},"modified":"2017-06-28T10:22:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-28T14:22:23","slug":"should-ubers-next-ceo-be-a-robot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7909","title":{"rendered":"Should Uber’s next CEO be a robot?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little more than two years ago, I suggested in a post<\/a>\u00a0that “the killer business app for artificial intelligence may turn out to be the algorithmic CEO.” I was picking up on a point that Frank Pasquale had made in a review<\/a> of The Second Machine Age<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[Thiel Fellow and Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin]\u00a0has stated that automation of the top management functions at firms like Uber and AirBnB would be \u201ctrivially easy.\u201d\u00a0Automating the automators may sound like a fantasy, but it is a natural outgrowth of mantras\u00a0(e.g., \u201cmaximize shareholder value\u201d) that are commonplaces among the corporate elite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned<\/a>, completing a meltdown of the company’s top management ranks, Uber and its investors have a perfect opportunity to disrupt the executive suite, and indeed the entire history of management, by using software to run the company. Let’s face it: Kalanick’s great failing was that he was not quite robotic enough. His flaws were not analytical but human. He was a victim of his own meat.<\/p>\n

A fundamentally numerical company, constituted mainly of software, Uber is the perfect test bed for the robot CEO. And since its staff includes exceptionally talented programmers, it already has the skill needed to gin up the algorithms necessary to do the work Kalanick and his lieutenants did (without the attendant buffoonery).* A two-day hackathon should be more than sufficient to create a robot able to translate spreadsheet data into resource-allocation plans and use machine learning to compose forward-leaning messages that inspire staffers, drivers, and venture capitalists. And to have Uber’s robot CEO sit next to Cook, Nadella, Bezos, et al., at the next White House photo-op<\/a> would be a huge PR coup.<\/p>\n

Not only is Uber the right company for a robot CEO, but now is the right time for one. Just two months ago, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma predicted<\/a> that\u00a0“in thirty years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO.”** As the financier Martin Hutchinson pointed out, there’s no reason to wait that long. “Human CEOs have amassed an especially dire track record in the last two decades,” he wrote<\/a>. “Whereas their compensation has soared far faster than overall U.S. output, productivity growth in U.S. businesses has notably lagged, indicating their failure to invest optimally.” If there were ever a job to be automated, it’s that of the underperforming, overpaid modern CEO.<\/p>\n

Even at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the case for a robot CEO was laid out<\/a> in compelling terms:<\/p>\n

\n

There are some distinct advantages to having a robot as your company\u2019s CEO. Firstly, they might be able to make better, more responsible, decisions. …\u00a0Robots don\u2019t face the unpredictability we humans face, so their decisions are more likely to be consistent, based on facts. …\u00a0Robots can work all day, every day. They don\u2019t need sleep, weekends or holidays. No mere humans can say the same, however hard they may try to cultivate that impression. …<\/span>\u00a0And if you\u2019ve created one CEO robot, why not create a few more? It\u2019s not as if he or she has a unique personality. Technology allows them to interact wherever your customers are, further cutting down travel costs and helping the environment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We may look back on Kalanick’s resignation as the most transformative act of his eventful career. He has opened the door for a robot CEO. The question now is whether the Uber board will welcome the future or resist it.<\/p>\n

_________<\/p>\n

*On further thought, Uber’s coders probably have better things to do than write simple CEO algorithms. What’s really needed are cloud-based virtual CEOs. Yes: CEO-as-a-Service. Are you listening, Marc Benioff?<\/p>\n

**Ma’s assumption that Time<\/em> will still be around, with its cover intact, thirty years from now makes me question his futurist cred. But I’m going to assume he was speaking figuratively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little more than two years ago, I suggested in a post\u00a0that “the killer business app for artificial intelligence may turn out to be the algorithmic CEO.” I was picking up on a point that Frank Pasquale had made in a review of The Second Machine Age: [Thiel Fellow and Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin]\u00a0has stated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7909"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7950,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909\/revisions\/7950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}