Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it. From a report: When Tony Huffman stepped away from the production line at the Denso auto part factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, to talk with WIRED earlier this month, the workers he supervised were still being watched — but not by a human. A camera over each station captured workers’ movements as they assembled parts for auto heat-management systems. The video was piped into machine-learning software made by a startup called Drishti, which watched workers’ movements and calculated how long each person took to complete their work. […] Denso’s use of Drishti shows how some jobs will be transformed by artificial intelligence even when they’re unlikely to be eliminated by AI anytime soon. Many jobs in manufacturing require dexterity and resourcefulness, for example, in ways that robots and software still can’t match. But advances in AI and sensors are providing new ways to digitize manual labor. That gives managers new insights — and potentially leverage — on workers.

Some workers say the results are unpleasant. Last year, Amazon warehouse employees in Minnesota staged a walkout to protest how the company uses inventory and worker-tracking technology. They allege that Amazon uses it to enforce a punishing working pace that causes injuries. The company has disputed those claims, saying it coaches employees on how to safely meet quotas. Workers at Denso were initially wary of the prospect of being video-recorded all day to feed machine-learning algorithms, but Huffman says they have since come to appreciate Drishti’s technology. After something goes wrong, workers can now look at the data and video with their managers, instead of having to hope bosses take their account of what happened seriously. Huffman says having a constant readout on productivity also helps managers be more responsive to nascent problems. “If somebody’s struggling, not every associate is going to call for help,” he says. “If we see their cycle time is jumping through the roof, we can go over and say ‘Are you having any issues?'”

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Source: Slashdot – When AI Can’t Replace a Worker, It Watches Them Instead

Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space — five times bigger than anything observed before. Iwastheone shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth. The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Researchers reported their findings [PDF] in The Astrophysical Journal. “I’ve tried to put this explosion into human terms and it’s really, really difficult,” co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News. “The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst — which it probably didn’t, but anyway — it’d be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that’s incomprehensibly big. Huge.”

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Source: Slashdot – Telescopes Detect ‘Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang’

U.S. regulators approved a plan to pay Intelsat SA and other satellite providers to give up airwaves so they can be redeployed for the fast 5G mobile networks being rolled out. From a report: The Federal Communications Commission on a 3-2 vote Friday approved Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan for as much as $9.7 billion to clear the frequencies, with the money coming from bidders expected to include large telephone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. The action “will help deliver 5G services to consumers across our country and promote our global leadership,” said Pai. The satellite companies use the spectrum to beam TV and radio programs to stations, but say they can give up part of it while still serving customers on frequencies they retain, in part because they would use new satellites to carry data. The FCC will sell the airwaves at a public auction. Pai earlier proposed that Intelsat get as much as $4.85 billion for clearing airwaves quickly. The FCC in its vote didn’t say if that figure had changed.

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Source: Slashdot – FCC Approves Plan To Pay Satellite Companies To Give Up Airwaves