Paying the robots
On CEO salaries, comparative advantages, and how much to regard as empty smoke
When a CEO appears to be the recipient of a much-too-generous compensation package, it's a smart move for investors to ask how much talent the company could get for the same amount of pay, but doled out to a number of lower-level workers. Is one person's work really worth $89 million for a year, and how much would the company have gained from hiring 100 people at $890,000 each instead? The answer isn't a foregone conclusion, but it's a vital exercise in checking one's perspective.
â– The same is true for other investments. Open AI is about to offer a package deal on access to its highest-level artificial-intelligence platform for $20,000 a month. That's the price, but how much is it worth?
â– Like CEO salaries, investments insist on being understood as comparative values. There are certainly some occupations that would benefit from an AI assist. For others, though, a $20,000-a-month package shouldn't be spent on artificial intelligence, but rather on a pair of high-value, $10,000-a-month human employees.
■Our ability to comprehend numbers goes away quickly once we cross a bundle as small as three or four. There's a reason American telephone numbers are described with three-digit area codes, and it's because we can't be made to hold more than a few digits at a time in our memory banks. Big numbers just don’t make sense to our monkey brains.
â– AI is a mania right now, and seemingly everyone seems to want to prove a use case for it. When it comes to being hired out, the choice isn't in the dollar figure alone. The real price of anything is what you give up to get it.
