AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized
54 comments
·March 2, 2025runako
daveFNbuck
Why do you think senior managers would replace themselves if they could? Given the choice between saving a company and giving a senior manager slightly more money or power, the senior manager will always win.
noosphr
The ultimate authority in any public company is the board.
The majority of employees will never have to think about it, but everyone from the CEO down is ultimately hired at their discretion.
To see how things normally operate read up on the OpenAI drama. If Sam Altman wasn't as politically savvy as he was the board would have fired him in a Friday announcement and by Monday a new CEO would have been in charge.
jclulow
"When I was a child, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects, an effort that could consume half a day. Back then, knowledge wasn’t cheap or easily accessible."
It was literally a free library, open to every member of the public.
dharmab
Maybe it was better in big cities but when I was a kid researching papers on niche topics was tough because the local library had few books, mostly older ones, and I had to have my parents drive me there because it was too far to bike...
When we got 24/7 internet it was a game changer, it was like turning on a tap of knowledge on every topic. Of course the signal to noise ratio was higher back then...
timr
I get what you're saying, but later in life I went to university, where I had access to better libraries, for which the quality and quantity of information is (to this day) greater than you can obtain on the internet [1].
Things like arxiv are a step toward that "tap of knowledge on every topic", but the overwhelming feeling I get from most internet content these days (and that includes LLM output) is that it's an inch deep and a mile wide [2]. A good book -- which can usually be found at your local library -- will vastly exceed the quality of what you can find on your own, if only because of intelligent curation.
Maybe I'm just a romantic (or just old), but for me, libraries are still where you do serious research.
[1] yes, I know that many university libraries have a selection of their content on the internet now, but usually this is behind a login, and it certainly isn't comprehensive.
[2] recent example: I've been working through McCullough's "The Great Bridge", and there are frequent occasions when I want to find out more information or see diagrams of what he's describing. The internet is, nearly always, completely useless for this. Tons of content on the Brooklyn Bridge, but it all says the same superficial stuff. Though I will grant that you at least can find some stuff like this now, if you try hard enough:
https://bklyn.newspapers.com/article/brooklyn-eagle-the-brid...
j7ake
Going into university libraries fills me with awe and purpose.
Seeing a shelf of curated textbooks on a topic (eg non Newtonian fluid flow), gives me a feeling of depth. Each book represents years or decades of an authors life. And they condensed that wisdom into a textbook that could be consumed in a semester.
I would love to be a Knuth type character working in library and writing textbooks.
crystal_revenge
Your public library didn’t have inter-library loan? Most public libraries have always been able to get you books not in their collection, you just have to ask.
rob-olmos
Adding to the GP & sibling: Even in Los Angeles with some of the bigger libraries the IT/programming books were on the older (outdated?) side.. The more modern material was at the book stores like Barnes, Borders, or another one at the mall (I don't remember if it was B Dalton, Walden, or something else).. thankfully I could skateboard there after school or work and read them there for the evening since I couldn't afford them. Getting the internet and SNR of content back then was a game changer to me too.
dragonwriter
> Your public library didn’t have inter-library loan?
Growing up before libraries had computerized databases, sure, they had ILL, but the books that weren't in their collection weren’t in the card catalog either, so you had no easy way of discovering that a book you might want outside of a library’s own collection (1) existed, and (2) was available through ILL. It wasn't until after the internet was generally available to the public that most public libraries I encountered had computerized catalogs with ILL availability.
spooneybarger
Mine in a deeply rural area did not. Going to a library as an urban dweller would imagine was an all day affair. We generally did it a few times a year but that was part of a larger trip to go to "the better hospital" or what not.
neilv
> because the local library had few books, mostly older ones,
I think this is an important observation. In the age of the Web, people might not appreciate what it means when your access to information on a topic is sometimes only through outdated sources, which is a bit different than not having access at all.
I was lucky that my mom frequently brought us kids around to multiple public library branches, but I definitely remember a lot of older books.
For example, a book explaining an electric circuits would involve photos of some kind of common household item large cylindrical battery cell with screw terminals, which I have never seen, not before, nor since. And pretty much any book on computers, robots, or electronics would be at least a few years old, usually several years or a decade or more. (This has improved, at least at my current local library.)
Another effect of being exposed to lots of older books is that, although my hair is still not gray, I'll sometimes inadvertently speak with anachronistic, old-timey language that predates me.
With the old public library books, I also got a dose of vintage subtle American propaganda (e.g., freedom and justice are good, and are American; dictators and secret police are bad, and are Nazi/Soviet), though the Cold War already seemed to be ending. I'm programmed to believe that that propaganda was a positive influence, but it's sometimes uncomfortable values, when one sees an overall citizenry that doesn't always seem to have been marinated as much in quite the same mix of programming.
softwaredoug
I had the experience of needing to scan analog, historical original sources on microfiche for my history degree. You get really good at a kind of gestalt linear search through materials. Tricks like glancing at the first / last sentence of paragraphs for the general topic, then anticipating what the author is _probably_ saying in the next few pages, really helps you get through a lot of content fast, almost to the point of reading on an intuitive, unconscious level.
musicale
> It was literally a free library, open to every member of the public
It is (or was?) possible for libraries to build reasonably durable collections of physical books that they can manage as they choose, shelf space permitting (and if not, books can be sold to make space). But as publishing shifts from physical to digital there is no first sale doctrine for ebooks, so they are controlled by license agreements from publishers.
giantg2
You're forgetting opportunity cost.
SoftTalker
Also that the child who spent half a day at the library researching a subject probably learned something. Having an AI simply do all that for you teaches you nothing.
edoceo
Lots of value in the research process, multiple sources, slow reasoning. VS uploading Kung Fu to your brain.
pitched
Our brains are built to learn and never stop doing it. It’s always “what” are we learning, not “if” we are. The use of AI is absolutely teaching something.
ripped_britches
Rare earth minerals are also free by this definition
champdebloom
Someone recently tweeted that we use so much software because we’re now expected to do more work than is reasonably to be expected of humans and I’d have to agree.
There’s too much information to manage and too many tasks to juggle to keep up without good tools. AI just extends the range of what a person can take on.
noobermin
I read up till the "realisation moment" of something he could have easily found by using a notepad and some google searches. No, that wouldn't take weeks, it would likely take the same 2 to 3 hours that they felt "exhausted by" typing things into a textbox and reading.
pitched
Knowing what question to ask is always the hardest part of research. Getting there take a bit of creativity and it’s hard to compare one creative process with another. It can be very beneficial to swap between them when you get stuck though. Knowing that there is this Google alternative that produces similar results in similar times is a boon.
rriley
The article assumes the future of work will remain digital, but AI won’t just change how we work, it will orchestrate everything transparently in the background, eliminating the need for digital workflows and automating knowledge work entirely. The real economic shift will be toward non-digital, real-world human experiences, things AI cannot replicate, like hands-on service, emotional connection, and physical interaction, making them the most valuable assets in the AI-driven era.
analog31
A younger engineer at a place where I worked observed: "All of our processes are held together by human glue." This was after he discovered that there were individual people within the organization who possessed exclusive knowledge about how the business's products and processes worked, and even of who those people were. This is despite the fact that the organization has clear procedures for every operation.
I think it was John Gall who pointed out that all sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time, meaning that some of the controls have been bypassed, or are being operated manually.
Because the automatic controls operate invisibly, the only visible work is that of humans overriding the manual controls, which will always seem chaotic and inefficient. In fact this could already be the status quo today in many organizations such as bureaucracies.
If this remains the case, then the AI-orchestrated workplace of tomorrow will look like the highly computer orchestrated workplace of today, with the computers operating invisibly in the background, and humans manually correcting the errors. To overcome this stage in our development as a civilization, the controls don't just have to be automatic, but error-proof.
noosphr
All the names and places have been changed to protect the guilty:
When I was a young data engineer in 2014 at a very large telco in Canada the real time resource allocation of network bandwidth would work flawlessly from 6am to 11pm, but would have a random panic every day at 11.25 pm, where the cluster would enter a degraded mode until just after 6am the next day.
This was very weird, but I trace the issue to a bunch of NFS drives which started being used after 11pm. We figured some job somewhere needed to run then and there was nothing to do about it but migrate the hardware. After a couple of months, a lot of planning and tens of millions we moved the data from those drives to some shiny new beefy servers and the problems went away.
Years later I worked with someone else from that telco. Turns out he was in a team that did nothing but monitor the allocation of jobs on the compute cluster in real time and decide which machine each job ended up on. Their work hours were from 6am to 11pm.
kj4211cash
This is a really interesting take. I find the argument that AI will lead to mass unemployment both historically and economically illiterate. There will always be some things a person can do that a machine can not (yet) do that is worth some economic value. I have had a hard time identifying what those things are. But you're probably right. It's probably non-digital stuff.
EigenLord
I'm of two minds about all this. As someone who has become obsessed with seeing what these models are capable of, I can confirm that they can be used to achieve unprecedented things. But you get out what you put in. The most interesting results of these models are human-AI collaborations. If the "knowledge economy" just becomes bots passing generated outputs back and forth between each other, I think we're in for a rude awakening.
I can think of many AI generated outputs, perhaps with many quality suggestions, that I skimmed over or didn't fully appreciate. Did the sum of knowledge increase in the world? No, because knowledge has to be received by a mind. It's only the ones that I engaged with, influenced and ultimately made my own, that left an impression and added to the sum of knowledge in the world, often though a kind of alchemy of me and the model interacted in a "mind-meld" greater than the sum of its parts.
Human minds-minds in general, which these models don't have-stand for something. They're the glue that stitches things together, that makes important decisions and judgement calls, that forms the integration point where everything comes together. We can't remove that from the equation without losing something in return. I've also caught myself making embarrassingly lazy queries for coding problems that would have taken me 10 minutes to fix, but I prompt for them anyways because I've already been through that song and dance and want those 10 minutes back. If I kept doing that, if that was all I ever did, my brain would wither to the size of a walnut. I genuinely worry how LLMs are going to deprive an entire generation of youths of the use of their minds.
dtagames
Good stuff. No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented. I agree with this author after my own experiments with AI tools over the last three years. They're here to help people execute more work, faster. The human work will become deciding and controlling what they do.
giantg2
Just like with farms, success will be consolidated with a much smaller number of big companies vs the current staus quo.
GPerson
Unlike with farms, there’s not an alternative way of life in the city to run to.
kridsdale1
Sure there is. When your knowledge work is automated, go farm.
whatshisface
That's not tractors so much as the benefit of owning a lot vs. a few risks.
bluefirebrand
> No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented
I'm so tired of this sort of take because it isn't the whole picture
Yes, an individual farmer still works just as many hours. Thanks to modern equipment they accomplish much more and can manage much larger properties
As a result there are fewer farmers
"No one asked farmers to do less work" isn't the problem
The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore
Animats
> The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore
The US is way past that point, being down to under 2% farmers. China is mostly past that point, at 17% farmers as of 2017 and dropping. India is being hit hard by that, with 43% farmers. Their farmers are fighting farm mechanization.
bluefirebrand
Keep in mind we're not actually talking about farmers right now
We are talking about every industry that will have "productivity increases" due to AI tools
Which it seems might be every industry
It sure seems like we might be looking at a massive "productivity gain" across a ton of industries that is going to leave a whole shitload on people unemployed and franky
I'm a little worried about what that is going to mean
Terr_
Closely related: Textiles. There's a reason those were the first two things humanity mechanized the crap out of.
It's hard for us to imagine nowadays exactly how much distributed domestic work went into simply keeping the family in clothes.
samstave
If you boil to the essence;
AI will reveal true desire, passion, resolve in any cluster of conscience.
Meaning... either an individual or group or organization will thrive... (and thats it)
(but the good, bad and ugly... at min it is the litmus of our current time)
hapless
Azeem Azhar never has to worry about employment in an AI-obsessed world -- no executive worth his salt will ever be satisfied with an AI-based lickspittle. You need the genuine human article for that.
digitalnomd
The author basically tries to argue that not only corporate talent with low pay (e.g. customer service), but high impact talent pools will go from being scarce to being replaced by AI agents (e.g. PhD level researchers discovering new pharmaceuticals).
I don't think this has played out thus far. It still takes a qualified individual to ask the right questions of an LLM or Agent and then refine the results.
What I do agree with is that it's made talented individuals more productive, but that's less eye catching than claiming that it will cause companies to entirely restructure because educated labor will be replaced by LLMs.
bruce511
AI is a big change, which will permeate life. This kind of change can be scary. Stories trying to predict how things will change is both meaningless and also thought provoking.
History is full of big changes. We've all grown up with grandma's stories of indoor plumbing or electricity coming, or TV or whatever. Many of us now would sound insane describing a rotary dial phone to our grandkids.
So yeah, change is coming, but to be fair it's always been here. And the effects of the change can be surprising or predictable. But we'll figure it out as we go.
When I went to school there were no mobile phones. Computers at home were very niche. There was no internet. No email. Crumbs, when away from home we'd write, you know, letters! Being a typist was a job. Secretaries took dictation and wrote in shorthand. If we wanted a meeting we got together in the same room.
Will AI change things? Surely it will. Welcome to my world.
onemoresoop
Im not worried with AI as much as who will be controlling it. It could be a powerful tool for the wealthy to get wealthier and supress discontent if they’re the ones who leverage it. Yeah, of course nobody knows how things will eventually turn out but we ought to keep a tab on it.
null
keybored
> One surprising feature about all this tech is that I crunch through more work, more quickly than before — with a startling and happy result that I spend less time in front of a screen than I have in years.
I sit back in my chair with my vending machine cocoa. The 100K word report is done. Five years ago it would have been a 20K report. But still my AI assistants helped me get this work done in half the time that the 20K report would have taken.
The research justifying the narrative that AI will free up time instead of causing more work to fill up the time (if it works; if not it doesn’t matter) is done. Meaning I can take the rest of the day off.
Tomorrow I have 2M words to research. Five years ago that would have been 300K. But my AI assistants will summarize it for me. Meaning it still only will take half the time.
luccasiau
It's a little amusing to me that we ended up in a loop of (i) write bullet points, (ii) ask AI to expand bullet points into a long text, (iii) reader gets long text, (iv) reader uses AI to condense the long text into bullet points
The author non-ironically cites Klarna's year-old announcement around their pivot to letting AI do their customer support. Unmentioned is Klarna's announcement[1] from last month, after a full year the AI-first support, where they realize that people are the secret ingredient.
There's definitely some "there" there, but there is also a reason nobody is replacing their most expensive layer of staff (senior management) with much cheaper AIs.
1 - https://www.conversationalainews.com/klarnas-ceo-just-had-an...