Definition
The unmeasured cost borne by the person a system decides about or the frontline operator when a system pushes onto them the work of making an inflexible process function. That work includes vigilance, patience, error correction, and manual translation. It is the human compensation term in performance decomposition: the human subsidy counted as a cost to the people who carry it.
BurdenTemporal
Tests that show it is in place
- The gap between the institution's reported operating cost and the total time and labor needed to reach a correct outcome is calculated and reported.
- Uncredited work hours for users and frontline operators are measured before and after a deployment that claims efficiency gains.
Hypothetical example
- An electronic health record system reports reduced clerical overhead for hospitals while shifting hours of uncompensated documentation and alert filtering onto physicians each day.
References
- Performance decomposition · Term
- The antihuman metric · Theory