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A concept note prepared for an inter-industry working group on automated decision-making describes a job that would consist, from the first minute of a shift to the last, of confirming that a machine's output has been seen by a person. The role is provisionally called an authorised human reviewer. Nothing in the note has been adopted, funded or advertised. Two member agencies have nonetheless asked what the candidate profile would look like.

The profile would be short. Under the draft, the reviewer would not be required to hold a qualification in the field the decision belongs to — credit, triage, claims, admissions — on the grounds that the system already holds one and the reviewer would not be expected to out-argue it. The requirements would be legal capacity, a clean record, and a willingness to have a name attached to an outcome they did not compute.

Pay would not be set by skill, because no skill would be involved. It would be set by exposure. The note proposes a base rate plus a liability premium, the second component quoted by an insurer rather than an employer, which the authors describe without apparent discomfort as the first labour market in which the wage is priced by the underwriter.

The quota follows arithmetically. A service that produces several thousand decisions a day needs several thousand confirmations a day, and the draft sets the target accordingly. At that rate the time available per decision would fall below the time required to read it, a tension the note resolves by redefining review as availability to review — a phrase that appears in the glossary and nowhere in the legislation the role exists to satisfy.

“Nobody would be paid to rubber-stamp anything,” a spokesperson for the working group would be expected to say. “They would be paid to be the person who could have stopped it. Whether they did stop it is a separate metric, and one we would not publish, because the number would be small and easily misread.”

The objection raised in the only union submission quoted would not be about wages. It would be about what the job does to a person. A worker whose entire economic value is their capacity to absorb blame would occupy a position with no ceiling, no craft and no way to get better at it, because getting better would mean disagreeing more often, and disagreeing more often is the one behaviour the throughput target would punish.

None of this has been posted as a vacancy. But the demand is not hypothetical: the law in several jurisdictions already insists that a person stand behind certain automated outcomes, and it does not say how much of that person's attention the signature is supposed to contain. Somebody will eventually price that gap, and the note is simply the first document to write the number down.