A seat at the table for a member with no body
On super-stenographers, admitting error, and why it's lunacy to put an AI chatbot at the table during a board meeting
It’s never really clear in the moment at what precise moment a craze has hit its peak, but someone usually says something so spectacularly over-the-top as to offer a pretty good marker. For a gratuitous example: The CEO of Logitech declaring, on stage, that she would welcome an artificial-intelligence bot as a member of her company’s board of directors.
■ The problem isn’t that a board can’t use a reliable source of memory. Boards have secretaries and take minutes. They produce reports and reach decisions. A computer that works like a super-stenographer isn’t necessarily a bad idea, assuming that board members actually make use of the institutional memory available to them.
■ Nor is the problem that an AI agent can’t be properly trained to align with the people it serves. It can be done, though it requires very deliberate choices about which values and which stakeholders matter -- and in what measure. In theory, an AI agent could help to shed light on blind spots.
■ The really big problem is that it’s foolhardy to commit to high-technology solutions when very few corporate boards are any more capable of critical thought or independent analysis than a collection of potted houseplants. Warren Buffett even noted in his most recent letter to shareholders, “I have also been a director of large public companies at which ‘mistake’ or ‘wrong’ were forbidden words at board meetings or analyst calls.”
■ Decisions must still be made by people, and there is nearly overwhelming risk that technology treated as a cure-all will only serve to make human board members even more docile and compliant than before. Imagine the likelihood that any individual board member will want to speak up and challenge the computer “seated” at the table by the CEO: Who will dare to argue with the mystical oracle machine?
■ It’s plain old folly to focus on adding supposedly high-tech tools to human systems without doubling or tripling the effort devoted to improving the skills and qualities of the human beings at the table. That’s why the current moment seems a lot like the peak of a fad.
