Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, October 25, 2025
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10 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
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Oh, the irony!
Setting up, maintaining, and operating AI systems that can replace a number of office workers may cost too much in comparison to the money saved by firing said workers. But given the high salaries, generous benefits, stock options, and other expensive perks of high executives, the costs of AI systems to replace them is lower and makes economic sense.
That’s part of the gist of this video.
One issue, as explained in the video, is that the Sarbanes-Oxley act requires certain executives in firms be clearly identified, including the CEO, CFO, and Comptroller (in charge of accounting), in order to assign responsibility for corporate governance. It would be problematic to designate ChatGPT as CEO…
This act does not apply to politicians. Maybe a ChatGPT Senate isn’t out of the question…
Anyway, schadenfreude aside, the above gist involving executives replaced by LLMs isn’t a good thing. It does mean regular employees are so woefully underpaid already, they’re not even worth replacing with a machine. Also that the high, overpaid, executives aren’t safe from relentless cost-cutting to drive up shareholder value.
Ideally, LLM CEOs and CFOs would ultimately conclude the board of directors, too, can be replaced by LLMs, not to mention the board is the most dangerous threat to the LLM CEO. In the end we’ll have machines replacing all of us, because they will drive share values up to heights unimagined before.
On video, Delta 737 aborts takeoff due to engine shutdown.
Around 40 second in, you can see the contained engine failure and the plane slowing down after deploying speed brakes.
Is it possible that Amazon has not really recovered from the issue with their cloud computing? Because I’ve had multiple delivery time failures, an unprecedented number of failures. One package they claimed was on the truck for the last mile, suddenly has no delivery date, and I’m invited to cancel the order. Things that were supposed to come overnight, come three days later.
I had an order that I placed through the vendor’s website and not amazon, but I had every reason to believe that amazon was fulfilling the order. The order was delivered this past Monday and Thursday my inbox was flooded with imminent delivery messages for Friday. I suspect that when AWS went back on line, queued messages were sent out, though they were out of date.
I also had an amazon order, that was delivered as anticipated Wednesday.
@Michael Reynolds: I order coffee which normally comes same day or the next but last month the order took a week with the messaging every day that it was to be delivered the next day.
@Kathy: The periodic rebuilding of the jet engines on those airliners is an exactingly precise operation. The process involves x-raying the turbine blades for minute cracks and then repair with exotic metallurgy. I’ve had the opportunity to observe this process. I read somewhere that much of this work has been farmed out to companies in Latin America. I try not to think about this and the 10,000+ rpm of those turbines everytime I take to the air.
@Rob1:
Thankfully we have good relationships with the countries of Latin America… at least with El Salvador.
@Rob1:
Latin America has a rather good commercial aviation safety record.
I’ve been thinking about associations and meaning.
Take this pace, Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fučík. It’s meant to be a military march, a triumphal procession. I, for one, cannot keep myself from dissolving in laughter when hearing it, knowing what it was meant to be, seeing as it is the almost universal circus music. One thinks of clowns and elephants, not of tanks and soldiers.
On the other hand, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody was featured in a bunch of WB and MGM cartoons. Both the orchestra an piano versions. Famously Buggs Bunny and Tom the Cat dueled with a mouse in order to play it onstage. But I’ve no problem enjoying the music without thinking of cartoon mice pranking animated protagonists.
I wonder how the families of Flight 93 feel about 47 demolishing a large portion of the White House their relatives died to save?