It’s not just at intersections any more… (Human in the loop?)
Texting while driving? AI traffic cameras are watching you in these 5 states
… "Heads Up" cameras from Australia-based Acusensus take a picture of every driver that passes by – both the license plate and the front seat. Cameras can either be fixed in a permanent location or attached to a mobile trailer and work in almost any light or weather condition.
AI analyzes the photos to see if drivers are looking at their phones or not wearing seat belts; it then assigns a confidence level regarding how certain it is that there's a violation. (If you're concerned about privacy issues surrounding a stockpile of photos, the company says that all images are deleted after 15 minutes if authorities don't take action.)
Human discretion is still a part of the process, however, and tickets aren't sent automatically. If the AI flags an image, an alert pops up on an officer's computer screen. The officer reviews the image to determine whether or not an offense has occurred.
If they decide the driver was distracted, officers will either mail the vehicle's registered owner a ticket or pull over the vehicle and issue a citation.
If this is the norm for businesses…
https://www.bespacific.com/your-boss-is-watching/
Your boss is watching
MIT Technology Review [unpaywalled]: “…A New York Times investigation in 2022 found that eight of the 10 largest private companies in the US track individual worker productivity metrics, many in real time. Specialized software can now measure and log workers’ online activities, physical location, and even behaviors like which keys they tap and what tone they use in their written communications—and many workers aren’t even aware that this is happening. What’s more, required work apps on personal devices may have access to more than just work—and as we may know from our private lives, most technology can become surveillance technology if the wrong people have access to the data. While there are some laws in this area, those that protect privacy for workers are fewer and patchier than those applying to consumers. Meanwhile, it’s predicted that the global market for employee monitoring software will reach $4.5 billion by 2026, with North America claiming the dominant share. AI advances are rapidly speeding up the process of training robots, and helping them do new tasks almost instantly. Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. What matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. Managers and management consultants are using worker data, individually and in the aggregate, to create black-box algorithms that determine hiring and firing, promotion and “deactivation.” And this is laying the groundwork for the automation of tasks and even whole categories of labor on an endless escalator to optimized productivity. Some human workers are already struggling to keep up with robotic ideals. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power… In 2024, a report from a Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders, based on an 18-month investigation of Amazon’s warehouse practices, found that the company had been setting the pace of work in those facilities with black-box algorithms, presumably calibrated with data collected by monitoring employees. (In California, because of a 2021 bill, Amazon is required to at least reveal the quotas and standards workers are expected to comply with; elsewhere the bar can remain a mystery to the very people struggling to meet it.) The report also found that in each of the previous seven years, Amazon workers had been almost twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers, with injuries ranging from concussions to torn rotator cuffs to long-term back pain…”
(Related) ...perhaps this should not come as a surprise.
DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email
… But in response to a tweet about the usage of LLMs, Musk wrote on X that they were not “needed here,” and “this was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.”
Tools & Techniques. Looking to compete with the free office suites?
https://beebom.com/microsoft-free-ad-supported-office-quietly-launched/
Microsoft Quietly Launched a Free Ad-Supported Office App, and No One Noticed
Did you know that Microsoft officially offers the desktop version of Microsoft Office (rebranded as Microsoft 365 Copilot after Microsoft 365) for free? And no, I am not talking about the web version of Office. In a significant move, Microsoft has quietly introduced an ad-supported version of the desktop Office app, allowing users to access MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint without paying any subscription fee.
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