this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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I have a fantasy that someone tries using data driven systems to run business. They'd still need AI to do all the C-speak and top-tier sales work, but as it is upper management commonly resents their own workforce and enacts policy just to be vindictive.
Imagine a game company that didn't crunch because it knew crunching only slowed productivity and wrecked the health and morale of the dev team.
Imagine a company who didn't issue RTO mandates because it saw it's telecommuters are more productive and happier working from home.
Imagine if businesses didn't surveillance-max and micromanage their administrative clerks and fulfillment teams understanding that doing so slows them down and makes them miserable.
I don't know for certain that AI-assisted computers can run businesses and manage well, but we have countless examples of how upper management lets their feelings get in the way of maximizing profit and demonstrate incompetence and lack of adult maturity.
The bar really is that low.
AI can't do a CEO's job. A CEO is just a professional schmoozer. They're there to interact with and sell the company's services to a bunch of rich bastards. They're basically a highly paid escort that mostly gets to keep their clothes on.
If that's all a CEO was, then we'd have much more functional companies. But the CEO is also the top manager of the company and dictates policies that affect how the company is run. We're seeing specific examples of what is nothing short of labor abuse by executives such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. And they choose their policies for purely emotional reasons, as an expression of resentment and vindictiveness toward their own workforce.
In fact, this is the core of their fantasy regarding AI, that with enough R&D it will be cheap enough to replace their human staff entirely with robots, who don't have opinions and don't fight for better treatment.
If a company separated the executive suite from upper management, and instead had a brain trust to maximize profits by hard data and cold calculation, I submit human labor would be better treated, since well-treated workers operate at an improved rate of productivity, which actually makes it profitable to make sure they take their breaks and eat their lunches.
History shows us the ownership class always thinks their workers are willfully withholding effort, and as we've seen during the North Atlantic slave era, the ownership class will work labor to death if they are allowed to do so.