Their Margin is AI's Opportunity

Could a “ChatCEO” reduce costs and improve business?

Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your margin is my opportunity,” and for nearly 30 years Amazon has destroyed brick-and-mortar margins to dominate retail sales and distribution. With the advent of social media 20 years ago and its explosive growth in the last decade, the new “margin” became our own attention. Big Tech has profited mightly by extracting our attention away from the time we once spent with family, friends, and neighbors. In force-feeding us the Internet’s most incendiary garbage, we are angrier, lonelier, and more depressed than ever–by design.

Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Andrew Yang, and Elon Musk are among the most prominent of the more than thirty-three thousand people, predominantly men, who have signed the open letter to pause AI experiments earlier this year. While the letter raises some valid concerns, the existential-risk-to-humanity cries about the “dangers” of artificial intelligence have been rather vague and feel more like fear-mongering than actual concerns. The clearest example of harm is already widely available:  generative AI is easily used by human or nation-state actors to manipulate populations–a continuation of social media’s scorched social fabric march toward profits.

With so many names of AI technology gatekeepers on the call for pause, author Douglass Rushkoff has noted that the strategy feels similar to a "would-be street fighter depending on his friends to ‘restrain’ him lest he take the other guy apart, it’s just a form of bluffing.” These tools still require a great deal of human creativity (and malevolence) to cause trouble, and no development pause will curb our current profit and power-driven paradigm in which executives view human attention as something to harvest at the brain stem.

The threat from artificial intelligence is not Skynet-style extermination of humanity but rather an elimination of the joyful experiences that make us human. We are closer to a Matrix-type dystopia than I’ve ever cared to admit. Not driven by self-aware machines but instead driven by short-term profits and an ignorant elite, who are now succumbing to their own algorithms, while attempting to shove us into a Ready Player One-style metaverse.

It’s not the rise of artificial intelligence, but the fall of emotional intelligence (EQ) that remains humanity’s biggest threat. As the algorithmic attention extraction system continues to expand, it has now come for the elite themselves. Mark Zuckerberg and Musk threaten to livestream a brain stem-driven cage fight and Bezos is focused on Instagramable yachts and rockets, while the hubris of the Titanic has claimed five more lives after 111 years on the sea floor. Operating exactly as designed, the system they created and funded has thoroughly set its sights on the wealthy.

Today there is a new emerging bloated margin to be exploited: the vast expanse between business leaders with and without a value for and possession of emotional intelligence. Musk and Peter Thiel seem to celebrate their lack of EQ and Zuckerberg is as out of touch with the ground as an avatar with no legs. Being out of touch with the 99% may be a fatal flaw, and AI could be well-positioned to capitalize on this disconnect.

Any large language model like ChatGPT could easily mimic the shortsighted “rank and yank” logic used by “Neutron Jack” Welch minions over the past fifty years in the pursuit of efficiency over value–a logic that has decimated the middle class. Despite the, now quaint, humanity-lifting aspirations of founders’ annual shareholder letters, most have been crippled by embedded growth obligations that founders have been incapable of escaping.

However, as the signers of the open letter feel the pull of the algorithms on their own attention, we may be at the dawn of a new age in business. Now that ChatGPT can pass a bar exam, earn an MBA, and create all manner of business, legal, and strategy documents, artificial intelligence could also eventually replace the executive and investor classes. Given the opportunity, AI will easily master the administration of business. Perhaps AI could even run a business well enough to achieve B Corp Certification.

And perhaps that is what the gatekeepers are afraid of. When machine intelligence deploys financial capital better than either an Ivy League graduate or a well-timed dropout founder, their game will be over. The merger of machine learning and stakeholder capitalism could chart a new course, offering humanity our attention back by simply eliminating a layer of financial overhead. Corporations could start cutting those margins by replacing expensive, myopic CEOs with a “ChatCEO” that understands three simple commands–respect human dignity, minimize environmental harm, and maintain long-term profitability.