Last year, during the month of August, the Chinese company NetDragon Websoft, specialized in multiplayer games and mobile applications, appointed an artificial intelligence as CEO (or executive director) in one of its main subsidiaries, Fujian NetDragon Websoft. Six months later, the management of this AI made the company grow by 10% on the stock market.
Artificial intelligence and especially ChatGPT are coming to produce a type of anxiety, ‘AI-nxiety’, which is leading thousands of people to think that this technology will replace thousands of jobs of all kinds. Something like Henry Ford’s assembly line, but on a grand scale. Claims such as the one from the World Economic Forum, which in 2020 predicted that approximately 85 million jobs could be displaced by 2025, acknowledging that automation in the workforce has increased at a faster rate than anticipated, are hardly reassuring. While at first it was taken for granted that the heaviest and most mechanical jobs would be automated, ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion came to show that the arts, literature and even programming are also a matter of machines.
Now, the artificial intelligence Tang Yu, the CEO appointed by NetDragon, has come to scare senior officials since in her first six months of management, she has managed to increase 10% on the Hong Kong stock market, raising the value of the company , they are even outperforming the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in general, according to data shown in The Hustle.
Although the AI ??in positions of power comes from afar. Already in 2018, a robot presented itself to the mayor’s office of a Tokyo district to end corruption. In fact, this robot, called Michihito Matsuda, managed to come in third place with 4,013 votes. A scenario that was already anticipated by the anime series ‘Evangelion’, where decision-making rests with MAGI, a superintelligence that governs Tokyo-3.
“We believe that AI is the future of corporate governance, and our appointment of Ms. Tang Yu represents our commitment to truly embrace the use of artificial intelligence to transform the way we operate our business and ultimately drive our future strategic growth,” NetDragon Chairman Dejian Liu explained in a press release last August.
“We will continue to expand our algorithms behind Tang Yu to build an open, interactive, and highly transparent management model as we gradually transform into a metaverse-based work community, allowing us to attract a much broader base of talent across everyone and put us in a position to achieve bigger goals,” he adds in the document.
At NetDragon, whose annual revenue is close to 2.1 billion dollars (around 1.95 billion euros), AI Tang Yu is responsible for all the typical functions of a front man for the company, reviewing high-level analysis, making leadership decisions, assess risks and promote an efficient workplace.
The difference is that she doesn’t need to rest, she doesn’t have a family to take care of, she doesn’t get sick, she works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, she doesn’t need to sleep, eat, or have a coffee break, and besides, her salary doesn’t have nothing to do with the fees that are usually charged by equivalent charges. Tang Yu receives zero euros gross per year for her work.
Keep in mind that in ‘Fortune 500’ companies (the five hundred largest American companies) the average salary of CEOs is now around 16 million dollars per year (more than 14 million euros). In fact, in the last 45 years, the average salary of CEOs has increased by 1,460% while that of workers has only increased by 18%. The result is that an executive director receives on average the equivalent of what 399 workers earn.
The larger the company, the higher this difference is. For example, in 2021, the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassey, received a package worth 213 million dollars (more than 197 million euros), equivalent to the collective salary of some 6,474 Amazon employees. A salary force that will be enough to fully manage four logistics centers of the company. Tang Yu’s successful management for now is unique, but who knows if when accounting for the cost of maintaining senior human positions, other large companies choose to imitate NetDragon’s model.
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