What’s Dragging Down A.I. Efficiency? The ‘Verification Tax.’ - The New York Times

The pitch was simple: the machines do the work, you go to the beach. Instead, the New York Times reports that AI has invented a new clerical caste whose entire job is checking what the machines did. The trade calls it a "verification tax," or "botsitting," or "rework" — three names for one thing, which is usually a sign nobody wants to say the thing out loud. The Times concedes the labour is "often arduous." Translation: you have been promoted to unpaid supervisor of a stochastic intern who has read the entire internet and retained none of it.

Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, went through San Francisco Fed data this week and produced the only honest sentence in the sector, which is worth reading twice: "the productivity payoff from A.I. remains a forecast rather than an observation." The number underwriting the data centres, the valuations and the keynote slides is, on inspection, a forecast. A forecast is what you write when you do not have an observation. Everyone from the Fed to your own IT department has now confirmed, in writing, that the return on this thing belongs in the "coming soon" column, and that column has been coming soon for longer than any roadmap will admit.

The part that stings is the arithmetic nobody puts in the deck. Every agent you deploy mints a fresh queue of outputs requiring human sign-off, and the sign-off gets performed by the person the deck promised to redeploy. So the headcount savings are booked this quarter and the verification tax is paid forever, in the currency of your most expensive people reading plausible nonsense and initialling it. "Human-in-the-loop" is what the industry calls this when it wants you to believe the bottleneck is a feature. Slok's line isn't a warning; it's a receipt.