DECISION FATIGUE IN AI WORKFLOWS

Every so often, an airport scanner deliberately shows the screener a gun that isn’t in the bag.

And if you’re integrating digital intelligence into processes with a ‘human in the loop’, you might want something similar.

Back in the Second World War, RAF radar operators hunting U-boats kept missing signals. These were highly trained, motivated people. And so the RAF asked a researcher called Norman Mackworth to find out why.

He built a clock.

His clock had a black pointer that ticked round a blank face in small steps. And every so often it jumped two steps instead of one. All you had to do was spot those jumps. And keep spotting them for two hours.

It was, we imagine, nobody’s favourite task. And within half an hour, people were already catching fewer of them.

These weren’t bad staff. But watching for something that rarely happens is very hard. For an airport screener, almost no bag has a gun in it.

And it gets harder the rarer the event you’re looking for. In a lab test made to look like baggage screening, volunteers missed about 7% of targets when they turned up in half the images. When they turned up in 1%, they missed about 30%.

Hence the fake guns. They give screeners something to find. Spot one or miss one, and you know about it.

Now imagine another scenario in an office – you’re seven hours into a long day of decisions. You’re on report 85 out of 101, all drafted by AI.

You used to write no more than 10 of these a day. And the easy bits were where you got your breath back. But now the AI does those, and what’s left is deciding. All day. Every day. Decision after decision. Which fries your brain. Or, in more professional terms – you quickly develop decision fatigue.

And the better the AI gets, the rarer the issues become. So you tick tick tick. But will you spot the issue in report 86?

Maybe not. Which is why this type of work needs careful design.

How many reports in a day? How long without a break? Is the evidence to spot a mistake even there in the first place?

And how would you know if things were being missed?

An airport finds out by slipping in a fake gun. How about the rest of us?