Part three. The CheckerLesson 12 of 15
The work that stays human
Some work should not be automated even when it can be, and the reasons are operational rather than sentimental.
The instrument The work that stays human
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There's a category of task that passes every technical test and should still be done by a person. The reasons are practical, not romantic. Work that maintains the skill required to check other work. Work where the cost of a confident error is unbounded, because if a wrong output cannot be caught downstream and the consequence is not recoverable, average accuracy is the wrong measure. Work that is the sensing apparatus of the organization. Somebody handling exceptions personally is how a business finds out its world has changed. Automate every exception and the operation becomes efficient and blind. State which work is deliberately staying human, and why, in writing, before the program starts. Left unstated it will be automated by someone optimizing a metric.
There is a category of task that passes every technical test and should still be done by a person. The reasons are practical, not romantic.
Work that maintains the skill required to check other work. Covered by the fourth condition, and it means deliberately keeping some volume manual.
Work where the cost of a confident error is unbounded. If a wrong output cannot be caught downstream and the consequence is not recoverable, the expected value calculation is dominated by the tail, and average accuracy is the wrong measure.
Work that is the organization's sensing apparatus. Somebody handling exceptions personally is how an organization finds out its world has changed. Automate every exception and the operation becomes efficient and blind, and it will discover a market shift from its results rather than from its people.
Work where the relationship is the product. Not because a person is warmer, but because a customer who reaches an automated response at the moment something went wrong learns something about your priorities that no recovery undoes.
The instrument is to state which work is deliberately staying human, and why, in writing, before the automation program starts. Left unstated it will be automated eventually by someone optimizing a metric, and the reason it was kept will be discovered afterwards.
Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything
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