This story is part of a collection of pieces on how we work today, from video conferencing to using productivity apps for off-label purposes to Silicon Valley culture. 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. "In the past, we would take a line that was struggling and bring a bunch of people down with stopwatches to try and make it better," Huffman says--at least for problems that seemed serious enough to justify the time and expense.

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. "In the past, we would take a line that was struggling and bring a bunch of people down with stopwatches to try and make it better," Huffman says--at least for problems that seemed serious enough to justify the time and expense. Drishti tirelessly logs the "cycle time" for every worker and station all day, for every shift.

Employees toil at lines, doing the same task, repeatedly, in order to assemble a final product. A line stoppage or bottleneck can cost a fortune. What if the manufacturer could see what was going on, in real time, and fix any issues before they become real problems? Or come up with ways to make the process run smoother and more efficiently? That's the basic idea behind Drishti Technologies, a four-year-old startup cofounded by Prasad Akella, a 57-year-old Indian entrepreneur who's best known for leading the General Motors team that developed collaborative robots in the 1990s.

New teachers, new backpacks, new crushes--and algorithms trawling students' social media posts. Blake Prewitt, superintendent of Lakeview school district in Battle Creek, Michigan, says he typically wakes up each morning to twenty new emails from a social media monitoring system the district activated earlier this year. It uses keywords and machine learning algorithms to flag public posts on Twitter and other networks that contain language or images that may suggest conflict or violence, and tag or mention district schools or communities. In recent months the alert emails have included an attempted abduction outside one school--Prewitt checked if the school's security cameras could aid police--and a comment about dress code from a student's relative--district staff contacted the family. Prewitt says the alerts help him keep his 4,000 students and 500 staff safe.