Over the last few years, there has been a lot of research and discussion in the media over growing concerns that AI is automating away many types of jobs leading to several industries requiring far fewer workers. But, in this article, whose title is of course inspired by Marc Andreessen's classic post, Why Software Is Eating the World, we take a look at a related but not as much talked about phenomenon that has been slowly and silently occuring of late. That phenomenon is the new and perhaps even more impactful trend of AI eating up managerial tasks and replacing the need for supervisory managers. One of the ways to look at the traditional responsibilities of a manager is via the lens of the team management lifecycle -- it starts with building the right team through recruitment activities such as interviewing and hiring people with the right skills, then allocating them appropriate tasks and assignments, making sure they perform their tasks per organizational and regulatory standards and guidelines, and lastly evaluating their performance to provide helpful coaching and feedback as well as taking remedial measures as required. In the following sections, we will explore how there have been several developments over the last few years which have led to radical changes in how each of these areas are performed by AI driven or AI augmented systems. It's probably not a surprise that the hiring process was one of the first to be disrupted by AI.

Scientists have taken inspiration from X-Men's Cyclops and created a contact lens that points a red laser at what the wearer is looking at. The regular-size contact lens is fitted with a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) which points in the direction the user is looking. French engineers used off-the-shelf components to create a working prototype which can be used for gaze recognition. Gaze recognition is a budding field of research and could be the next frontier for computer systems. Instead of using a touch screen or a mouse to control a device, gaze recognition would allow users to select options on a display just by looking at them.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Contact Lens, machine learning powered contact center analytics for Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at lower cost. With Contact Lens, supervisors and quality assurance managers can easily understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations within their contact centers. These insights allow companies to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify important customer feedback. With millions of hours of call recordings, contact centers hold valuable insights into the brand perception and customer satisfaction of a company.

Last December during its re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled Contact Lens, a virtual call center product for Amazon Connect that transcribes calls while simultaneously assessing them. After a monthslong preview, Contact Lens today launched in general availability in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions, with rollouts in additional regions to come later this year. As customer representatives are increasingly ordered to work from home in Manila, the U.S., and elsewhere, companies including John Hancock, Capital One, Intuit, GE, Square, Fujitsu, and Dow Jones are turning to AI solutions like Contact Lens to bridge gaps in service. The solutions aren't perfect -- there's always going to be a need for human teams, even where chatbots are deployed -- but COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI-powered contact center messaging.

Researchers at the Yonsei University of Seoul have developed a new type of robotic contact lens that can be recharged wirelessly and which could bring a wide variety of futuristic uses for contact lenses one step closer to reality. The new devices are built around a circular translucent antenna and super capacitor system that can receive continual power without needing to be plugged in to an external power source. These experimental new contact lenses will also be able to draw electricity without raising the temperature of the lens, eliminating a potential long-term cause of harm to wearers and the device itself. According to a report from Yonhap News Agency, because the lenses are completely self-enclosed they can be maintained with standard contact solutions without any risk of degradation. The team used soft contact lens material instead of rigid material to ensure the tools could be used in as wide a variety of circumstances as possible.

The tools, announced at Amazon's annual cloud event in Las Vegas, aim to help the company's cloud customers incorporate functionality such as natural language processing, but without long waits often associated with AI-related projects. Amazon says it is making this possible by integrating machine learning into the two new stand-alone services. "There's no machine-learning expertise required for either of these services. They're just plug and play. You don't have to get into all the weeds and get the training data and label the data and all those sorts of things," said Matt Wood, vice president for artificial intelligence services at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has packaged up another in-house Amazon capability and made it available to customers, having announced Contact Lens for Amazon Connect on Tuesday. CEO Andy Jassy has touted that Contact Lens for Amazon Connect -- the company's omnichannel cloud contact centre service -- will stitch together new abstractions for machine learning so AWS customers can have an easy to consume function. "Amazon Connect is one of the fastest growing services in the history of AWS … off to a blazing start," he said during the day one keynote of AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. "Using the same customer service technology Amazon has used … it's really easy to use." According to Jassy, Connect is the first call centre in the cloud with machine learning in mind.

A new robotic contact lens which is controlled by small eye movements, including double blinks to zoom in and out, has been created by scientists. The contact lens, which is made from just salt water, works by mimicking the natural electric signals in the human eyeball. There is a steady electrical potential between the eyeball's front and back, even when your eyes are closed or in total darkness. When you move your eyes to look around or blink, the motion of the electrical potential can be measured. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, developed the lens using these signals, called electro-oculograms, to control a soft lens.

Bank customers will soon be able to log in to their account just by looking at their phone. High street lender TSB has said it will introduce iris recognition on its mobile banking app in September. It will become the first bank in Europe to roll out this technology, in the latest attempt to crack down on bank fraud. To use the new way of accessing their TSB account, customers will need the latest Samsung Galaxy S8. To use the new way of accessing their TSB account, customers will need the latest Samsung Galaxy S8. Samsung added iris scanning to it security options, alongside face recognition and fingerprint scanning, when the phone was released earlier this year.

Samsung has said the its Galaxy S8's iris scanning provides users with'airtight security', but researchers have demonstrated that it can be easily bypassed using a photograph and a contact lens. A new video has revealed that hackers can place a contact lens over a printed photo of the smartphone owner's eye to unlock the handset. Although Samsung has noted that'the patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate' the makeshift eye is able to fool the technology - leaving many to wonder just how secure the technology really is. Samsung has said the its Galaxy S8's iris scanning provides users with'airtight security', but researchers have demonstrated that it can be easily bypassed using a photograph and a contact lens Using'a good digital with 200mm-lens' at about 16 feet (5m) from the phone owner, the team snapped the picture and then printed it out with a laser print that so was also manufactured by Samsung. But to make it look more realistic, the hackers thought of adding a contact lens on top of the print out – this'emulated the curvature of a real eye's surface'.