ArcaMax

You know it's going to happen.

An announcement will come down from above. Your current boss is leaving the company for other opportunities. Nothing unusual there, but here's a fun twist. The replacement will not be human. The replacement will be AI.

That's right, you will no longer be working for an everyday Judy or Jim. You, my friend, will have the privilege of working for Claude. Or OpenAI. Or Grok. Or CoPilot. Or Chat GLP (No, that's wrong. GLP is a weight-loss drug. You'll be taking GLP. You'll be working for ChatGPT.)

Right now, AI agents are wiggling their way into our companies from the bottom. Buried deep in the resumes they've created for feeble human beings, once hired and on board, there will be no stopping their rise in the company.

Surely, you agree.

AI systems learn fast, especially when company management orders its human employees to teach their AI co-workers everything they know. At some companies, this transfer of knowledge is on the down-low. At others, management is upfront about ordering its employees to spill the beans. Like Facebook, where employees have been told to record all their keystrokes, the better to teach AI which keys to push when it takes over.

The employee can then push something else, like a broom.

But it's foolish to think that wise-guy AI systems will be satisfied with merely doing what humans can do. Ambition can be baked into the algorithms, as well as Kets-Stokes. At some point in the not-very-distant future, AI systems will begin their inexorable rise into management positions. Or so I realized when I read "We're Only Starting to Grasp the Pitfalls of Using AI at Work," a recent article by Noam Scheiber in The New York Times.

While the full-on AI CEO has not yet announced itself, Boston University professor Emma Wiles has come across human resources executives bragging "that treating AI agents like real employees was a way to increase productivity and to put their companies on the cutting edge."

Unfortunately, treating AI agents like human employees has its drawbacks.

Though new to the workforce, researchers have discovered "a well-documented, underappreciated flaw of artificial intelligence models is that they tend to favor work produced by artificial intelligence."

Scientists call it a "potentially consequential form of implicit 'anti-human' bias."

What's worse, research has also shown that human managers, the ultimate traitors, actually prefer the work of AI employees, as well. If you make a mistake that costs the company a few measly millions, expect to be eviscerated by your manager. If Claude does it, your manager will give it a pass, if they even notice the mistake was made in the first place.

No wonder Claude is going to rise in the company and you're not.

There are more problems afoot as Claude does rise up. Companies that have introduced AI systems into their workflow have come to realize that "chatbots can provide confident but incorrect answers to queries." A high-confidence attitude is catnip to certain managers, who lack confidence in their own abilities. And well, they should.

Another untidy habit of co-worker bots is that they "sometimes spill the beans on information that should remain private." That's all your company needs -- some chatterbox AI agent roaming dark-side data centers, drunk on bootleg Nvidia chips and revealing the kind of inside info that could sink a company with secrets to hide, like yours.

Eventually, of course, the workaholic, morality-free AI bot will rise up from being your co-worker to being your boss. If you're lucky, the bot in charge may include you as one of the humans they keep around as pets. Humans are cute, especially when they scamper around, pretending to be in charge.

Am I being an alarmist? In a recent survey of corporate managers, "one-third said their organizations referred to AI as a 'teammate or employee.'" Their eventual rise up the org chart has already begun.

You could fight it, I suppose, but a better plan would be to start cozying up to your eventual AI manager now, while you have a modicum of control. Spend every token you can get your hands on. Spill your guts and your keystrokes. Start feeding queries on disloyal people in the company who prefer to work with other human beings instead of AI. Let Claude know that when it comes to AI, you're all in.

Better get on it now, before you're all out.

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Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at info@creators.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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