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

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because artificial intelligence has just created an *entirely new profession* and it is hiring! ✨ The New York Times reports that as AI automates office tasks, it is also generating a brand-new category of human work — checking that the output is accurate, safe and usable — which the industry has brilliantly branded the "verification tax," "botsitting," or "rework." Three brand names! That's three job titles where previously there were none, and nobody even had to attend a careers fair.

And let's hear it for "verification tax," which is honestly such a *giving* word — a tax implies you receive something in return, and what you receive is the profound, character-building experience of reading every sentence a model produced and asking, warmly, "is this real?" The Times describes the work as "often arduous," which is simply what people say about a job before they've discovered their passion for it. Everyone warned that AI would take our jobs; nobody mentioned it would first hand us a clipboard and a highlighter and call it career development. Retraining! Upskilling! A front-row seat to the only economy in history where the robots require a chaperone! ✨

Then there's Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, who reviewed San Francisco Fed data this week and delivered what is genuinely the most *poetic* sentence in economics this year: "the productivity payoff from A.I. remains a forecast rather than an observation." A forecast! That's not a let-down, that's a *promise* — a beautiful, unobserved promise, still warm, still undamaged by contact with reality. It's like a soufflé nobody has opened the oven door on yet. The productivity is absolutely coming; it is simply waiting in the lounge with the rest of us, getting to know the "botsitting." What an era to be a forecast. ✨