I wrote here almost exactly a year ago, about how CEOs shouldn’t be guessin’, they should be guiding’.
But they ain’t listenin’.
Back then, CEOs were guessing publicly and mostly fatuously about when, whether and how heavily a recession would land on the U.S. economy.
Now, these folks are guessing about AI. Whatever they’re asked to guess about, they guess about, I guess!
Friday in the Executive Communication Report (to which you should subscribe because it is useful and free), I ran an item:
42% of CEOs surveyed at the Yale CEO Summit this week believe AI could “destroy humanity” within the next five to 10 years, Fortune reports; meanwhile, 58% of CEOs said they were “not worried” about such a dystopian scenario.
Tell me, if you asked a sixth-grade homeroom that question, would the results be any different—or any more trustworthy? How about a group of “physicians,” from the state mental hospital?
If you ask me and most of my friends—all of whom are either college-educated or life-educated or both—whether AI will “destroy humanity,” you’d probably get results like these: 2% say yes, 3% say no, 95% say “don’t know.”
So why are corporate CEOs so sure of themselves, even on a subject most of them haven’t studied more closely than you or me? Probably because they make like $15 million a year, and when you make that kind of money, it’s hard to get your mouth to say, “I dunno.”
Maybe it’s up to us, to stop wondering what these folks think about things unrelated to the expertise for which they were presumably hired.
And to Fortune, to stop asking.
And maybe to the people who help CEOs communicate, to urge them to express with clarity and confidence what talents and knowledge and instincts and drive they think they bring to the job, specifically. And in the same breath, what they can’t be expected to know, any more than anybody else.
Like the future, for one thing.
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