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Notes -
I'm not sure what "baseline human performance" means in practice, but regardless of what actual objective criterion that means, we just have to get the error rate to be under 1/10^9 to be effective as a product, right? I don't understand how that, or any other rate you might choose, couldn't be reached, in principle.
Unimportant aside: I don't think 1 mistake in a billion is reasonable for any human or any tool, but, again, I don't know exactly what you're talking where the rubber meets the road - do you have any examples of interns who fail this or are just on the threshold, where you calculated that they fail at 1.1/10^9 or 0.9/10^9, to better illustrate this concept? But regardless, the exact number is unimportant.
It's not meant to be an excuse. I'm actually not sure how many 9s sure I am that I didn't hallucinate anything in my commute today, and I'm not sure that anything in my life exceeds 9 nines certainty. I'm not sure what point this exercise is supposed to make, though. Could you explain how my not being 9 nines certain that I'm not hallucinating things like this very conversation (I'd guess I'm 3 or 4 nines sure at most?) affects the point about an LLM's ability to be useful as intelligent, semi-autonomous tools if we lower their error rate to be beneath that of a typical human serving a similar role?
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