Technology

Machine thinking is here

You don't build an AI executive by mindlessly parroting stolen ideas from the internet like other generative AI models. You need to steal heaps of ideas and then pick the best one. In short, you need machine thinking. So we invented it.

Three-pillars of piCEO's machine thinking model

1. StrategiParrot idea aggregator

2. GreediRat profitable pathways decision maker

3. MilkMonie arrogance management system

StrategiParrot idea aggregator

We’ve used this basic model for piCEO. Instead of using the internet, we trained our model on 75,000 annual reports, which detailed the strategies of thousands of publicly traded companies. Working from this massive dataset, the machine can regurgitate a fully validated profit-maximizing strategy for just about any scenario. This is StrategiParrot.

You've heard of the stochastic parrot model of generative AI. It takes a prompt like “Why does baking soda react with water?” and reorganizes those words into the root of a statement, “Baking soda reacts with water because…” Then it finds all articles with those words and chooses the next most common word in the sequence; continuing on until the sentence, paragraph, or essay is complete.

GreediRat profitable pathways decision maker

Some of the most ubiquitous experiments in psychology are rat mazes, where rodents pick a path to find a feast.

Thousands upon thousands of these studies have confirmed that rats will choose a route with two treats over a route with one, reliably repeating actions that increase personal rewards.

This is rat learning. Machines can do this.

We trained an algorithm to run a rat maze, assess the various rewards on offer, and then identify the path with the most to offer.

But get this: we then tweaked the software to pursue piles of money rather than piles of desiccated entrails. Bingo, bango, we had GreediRat: a profit-bot that knows how to endlessly reward itself.

After StrategiParrot steals a bunch of ideas, GreediRat chooses the idea that offers the most spoils. Importantly, it does this without any regard for wider social or moral contexts.

Don’t be fooled by the modesty of the animal on which this system is modeled. If you don't think rat-level thinking is impressive, then you don't think corporations are impressive.

MilkMonie arrogance management system

One of the core challenges to overcome with this technology is hubris. Given its training material, piCEO immediately assumes it's in charge of an S&P 500 company that can treat customers, employees, suppliers and regulators with disdain.

That gross sense of entitlement isn’t a bad thing, per se. Being a dominant monopolist is definitely one of the best ways to maximize profits. But you need to get there first. Not all of our software users will be market giants who can do whatever they please.

We had to build an arrogance thermostat that would stop piCEO from veering toward total corporate anarchy too soon

So how do you stop your software from being a dickhead all of the time?

Programming a conscience is tricky and requires moral choices, which is fraught. Not to betray our Silicon Valley nihilism, but morality is a human illusion and we didn’t want to constrain our technology with subjective values.

The world created neo-liberal economics specifically to avoid morality. Letting the market decide what’s right or wrong is far more objective than getting into the messy business of culturally-mediated ethics, or icky decisions that might constrain growth.

We simply don't have the right to impose these so-called 'principles' on laissez-faire economics.

We needed a market-based control mechanism to keep piCEO from overreaching.

Finding a model on which to build our arrogance thermostat

Our first attempt at building an arrogance management system failed, but it was an illuminating failure. We had assumed companies became fully extractive after achieving market dominance and so we programmed piCEO to go into profiteering mode at 55% market share. But after running simulations with this model, we found the software was slower to gouge customers than real-world CEOs.

We were clearly missing some nuance in how companies assumed a mandate to exploit their market. We'd been wrong to suppose it was a democratic situation – where popular companies were voted into power by consumer choice.

The search for a new paradigm was extensive. We ultimately landed on a less celebrated but arguably more ubiquitous sociopolitical arrangement than democracy...playgrounds.

Every school lunchtime, bullies of the world exert control over a reluctant group of kids even though they’re not liked by any of them. And once ascendant, the bully extracts rent (aka, milk money) simply for not making things worse. This is the capitalist wet dream of recurring revenue for near-zero service.

The schoolyard system perfectly characterised the relationship between corporations and their stakeholders.

In particular, the bully’s clarion call – What’cha gonna do about it? – aptly captured the dilemma of a customer (or employee or supplier) who’s been enslaved by a corporation.

Customers are simply too scared to leave. They can’t bear the burden of phone trees, break fees, and loss of data that characterize the torturous exit from an incumbent supplier. Especially when the new supplier will subject them to an equally onerous onboarding process.

And then it hit us: the new supplier is the problem, too. They can also be hard to deal with and, besides which, they’ve got their own ambitions to be powerful and extractive.

That’s the thing about bullies: they’re never a single individual, they’re a feature of a system – a phenomenon as inevitable as playgrounds themselves. Escape from one bully invariably leads to capture by another. So kids (and consumers) just shut up and endure the black eyes.

We just needed some math to model the intrinsic hopelessness of the market. Enter the TCF.

MilkMonie's tacit collusion framework (TCF)

Our beta arrogance management system had mistakenly assumed consumers have a choice when, in fact, they don’t. Most vendors suck. As Nietzsche famously said: "The free market is dead." piCEO wasn't properly leveraging that fatality.

MilkMonie needed to acknowledge that companies don’t act alone to destroy consumer value. Whole industries act collectively to do it. So we created a category tracker that monitors the deteriorating behavior of each industry vertical.

It measures how extractive each sector is becoming in real time by recording things like price increases, privacy rollbacks, service cuts, and so on.

We've called this index the tacit collusion framework (TCF) and baked it into piCEO's MilkMonie arrogance management system.

To maximize shareholder return, a company should be on the leading edge of value decline for its industry, but it shouldn’t surpass the average by more than one standard deviation.

piCEO now knows exactly how much to screw its stakeholders without pushing them away.

And with that, the software is perfectly arrogant.