Measuring Human Effort: Braincycles

I've been mulling over an idea that's increasingly captured my attention.

The crux of many issues in human-computer interactions lies in our inability to discern whether actions within digital systems are human or computer-generated. This ambiguity is at the heart of problems like spam, banking fraud, or DDOS attacks.

However, the question "Was this action caused by a human or a computer?" is overly simplistic. It fails to capture nuances, such as the nature of recurring bank transfers or the process of mail merging, where a human action causes an infinite, yet predictable, series of effects.

Imagine if we could quantify the human attention expended in creating digital content. Consider a mail merge template: creating it might consume 10 'braincycles' of human effort. In contrast, the act of merging this template to produce multiple emails would dilute the 'value' of each email to a fraction of those 10 braincycles.

This concept could revolutionize how we manage information. For instance, in email sorting: an email worth just 1 braincycle suggests minimal human effort in its creation, hinting that it might warrant less of my attention too.

As we increasingly engage with Large Language Models, redefining how we view and value human effort in our digital exchanges is crucial.

As you can imagine, I have expended a lot of braincycles thinking about braincycles. They are metabraincycles.