The seas as repository, clever cockatoos and a king who has esoteric tendencies: The reading recommendations of the week from the science department of SPIEGEL. (Copy)

In order to prevent this as much as possible, the Institute for Applied Ergonomics in Düsseldorf has started the »KI_eeper« project, which is primarily aimed at the manufacturing industry.

The wealth of experience of the "baby boomers" is to be secured for the future by means of artificial intelligence.

"Much of what these men and women achieve is based on sensory perception," Nicole Ottersböck, the sociologist responsible for the project, told me in an interview.

A person who has stood at the same machine for twenty years, for example, can hear when something is wrong.

He perceives the smallest deviations and has a lot of "feeling" that can often hardly be put into words.

In order to secure the knowledge nonetheless, the use of technology is a good idea.

So you could record the noises of a machine - and then have the older employees evaluate it.

I was particularly fascinated by the story of a blacksmith involved in the production of ship propellers that are hardened in an induction furnace.

The man has a unique ability: he can tell from the glow color whether the material of the screws is faulty.

"In order to get the knowledge of this blacksmith, one could take pictures of the screws in the furnace, the blacksmith would have to evaluate the pictures and say whether they show defective products or not," Ottersböck explained to me.

Image recognition software could then be trained with artificial intelligence - and the knowledge of older people could be made available to younger colleagues.

Sincerely

I also recommend you:

• Environment:

  Can the seas be used as a repository for greenhouse gases?

• Pseudomedicine:

  The homoeopathic critic Edzard Ernst on the esoteric inclinations of King Charles III.

• History of technology

  : How German students tricked French casinos with a home-made computer

• Clever birds:

  The Australian cockatoos are constantly developing new techniques to steal leftovers from garbage cans.

  Many residents don't like that at all.

• Risks from street lamps:

  British researchers warn that the frequent use of light-emitting diodes could disrupt the biorhythm.

• Fire disaster:

  100 years ago, the Ottoman port of Smyrna went up in flames, tens of thousands of people died.

  The fire was followed by cruel ethnic expulsions that still have an impact today.

picture of the week

China is a country of records,

and the same goes for road construction.

In the coastal city of Ningbo, one of over 120 megacities in the People's Republic with over nine million inhabitants, a kind of motorway junction is currently being built on the Pacific.

The junction, which connects two major expressways, rests on 720 underwater pilings, some of which are around 100 meters long.

The cross is to be opened to traffic in 2023 – after a construction period of only around three years.

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