Some people, including gurus like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are scared by the possible applications of artificial intelligence in the military. Others see machines with AI as a threat for workers, stealing away their jobs. But a large number of other experts tend to downplay these worries, treating them a bit like superstitions for easily impressed kids.Think this is too far-fetched and your management job is too “creative” or smart to disappear in a snap? Think again. The Harvard Business Review recently run a fascinating article by Devin Fidler, who heads the the Workable Futures Initiative at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future, in which he discusses something called iCEO.

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How Artificial Intelligence (Robots) Could Eliminate (Or Reduce) The
Need For Managers and CEO’s to iCEO’s
By Dr.Mahboob Khan Phd
Some people, including gurus like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are
scared by the possible applications of artificial intelligence in the
military. Others see machines with AI as a threat for workers, stealing
away their jobs. But a large number of other experts tend to downplay
these worries, treating them a bit like superstitions for easily impressed
kids.
Since a number of these supporters are managers, employed by the very
same companies that are developing the AIs, one might wonder if they
look so carefree and self-assured because they know what they are
talking about, or just because they believe the upcoming revolution is
not going to affect them personally.
Like in the tale of the guy with the pentagram and the holy water that
Musk recently recalled, they believe they can summon the demon and
control it too.

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Well, there’s something that maybe they should consider before jumping
so cheerfully on the bandwagon: it’s not just low-skilled workers that are
going to be affected by the rise of autonomous agents, it’s also the
management that is at risk.I recently had a mind-opening conversation
and how it can happen “Thanks to this combination of blockchain
technologies and artificial intelligence,”I think ” we’re now potentially
able to create distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs), for the first
time.”
“ What that means is that is theoretically possible to bootstrap a
profitable business in, basically, a day, with a distributed team
performing all kinds of different functions all over the world. That’s
hiring, procurement, supplies, all of that stuff.”
So, how would that work in practice? The blockchain, remember, is the
decentralized, secure database that records and stores every transaction
that occurs in a network. It is used by the Bitcoin crypto-currency, but is
not restricted to it.
It’s basically an infrastructure that provides a ‘layer of trust’ (or makes
possible a ‘trustless environment, as some prefer to say, in which ‘trust’
is not needed, as it’s pre-coded in it) on which is possible to run several
applications. One of the most interesting being the so-called ‘smart
contracts‘.
Keeping it simple, we could say that smart contracts are contracts that
are made valuable, enforced and executed through digital means,
without the need for intermediaries that certify the validity of the
transaction or check that the task has actually been performed.
In a seminal article written in 1997, Nick Szabo used the humble
vending machine as an example to illustrate the concept. Whenever you
buy a product, you stipulate a contract whose terms are somehow
embedded in the machine. The machine takes in coins, and via a simple
mechanism dispenses change and product according to the displayed
price.

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In today’s data-driven world, thanks to the Internet of Things and
widespread connectivity, the possibilities are much greater than this.
Smart contracts could allow you to do almost everything, from buying
and selling a property to check workers’ performance and pay them
using the blockchain.
“That enables a whole new element of disruption. In theory, we don’t
even need to register a company anymore. You can have this entity that
generates profit running in the cloud and it’s completely anonymous and
it’s very difficult to trace who actually owns it,” I think.
There are a number of platforms that are already being created to take
advantage of that. One of them is called Ethereum, and offers the
promise of “unstoppable applications without any possibility of
downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.”
Most interestingly, these platforms would not necessarily need a
management. They could be run by an AI that controls all the processes,
assembles automated tasks with human contribution, and provides the
final service. Humans would still be involved, to a degree, but they
would not run the whole show.
Think this is too far-fetched and your management job is too “creative”
or smart to disappear in a snap? Think again. The Harvard Business
Review recently run a fascinating article by Devin Fidler, who heads the
the Workable Futures Initiative at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future, in
which he discusses something called iCEO.