Steve Jobs said something to the effect that he made maybe three CEO decisions a year. I mean, I think these are decisions like, "We're going to open our own line of Apple retail stores", but, still.
Being a CEO isn’t all that different from being a parent of a child from the POV of impactful decisions.
How many critical “parental decisions” have you made in the past week? Probably very few (if any), but surely you did a lot of reinforcement of prior decisions that had already been made, enforcing rules that were already set, making sure things that were scheduled were completed, etc.
Important jobs don’t always mean constantly making important decisions. Following through and executing on things after they’re decided is the hard part.
The banter is actually quite easy to automate. You can hire a human to play golf for a small fraction of what the CEOs get paid, and then it's best of both worlds.
Is it? Take a look at the bot accounts filling up social media (the non-obvious ones). It wouldn't seem to hard to make one that makes 2am posts about '[next product] feels like real AGI' or tells stock analysts that their questions are boring on an earnings call, which is apparently what rockstar CEOs do.
Sneers aside, I think one common mis-assumption is that the difficulty of automating a task depends on how difficult it feels to humans. My hinge is that it mostly depends on the availability of training data. That would mean that all the public-facing aspects of being a CEO should by definition be easy to automate, while all the non-public stuff (also a pretty important part of being a CEO, I'd assume) should be hard.
