A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott's 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot's harvesting history. The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer's computer system. With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office. "This is becoming more standard," says Pigott, who grows a rotation of wheat, oilseed, oats, and barley on his farm in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside an hour north of London. German chemical company Bayer cited the growth in such digitally assisted farming as a key reason for its 62 billion bid for Monsanto, which has become a leading provider of analytics used by growers.

Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated 1 million, her four-man "Call of Duty" squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. There, exposure and sponsor interest would dissolve. The distress Tully felt as she spent an April afternoon in a small, dark Burbank video studio watching her team attempt to avoid demotion was not the emotion she banked on when she put her money into the burgeoning industry. But upheaval is becoming something of a routine for the investors fueling pro video gaming's rapid rise. China's richest man, Russia's richest man, the U.S.'s fourth-richest man and a string of American multimillionaires all have ties to teams now.

He was in great company, with Ray Kurzweil, Robin Chase, and other providing incredible keynotes as well. Here is Nikolas' presentation (video to come at a later date): Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.

As the Future Finance Forum continues into the afternoon of Day 2 at FundForum in Berlin the audience could be lured into thinking they were about to sit through a sober discussion about big data and analytics cutting through the noise of multiple and disparate data points. However, when Luke Ellis, president of one of the world's largest hedge funds, the Man Group, starts the talks saying he is frightened almost every time he gets in a cab in a major city and he can't wait until "every car in every city is a driverless car" it is hard to pay attention to sober Oxford-based researchers showing the audience a better way to read charts and graphs. "I would be much happier having a car driving me," says Ellis. However, taxis aren't the only old world occupation on Ellis' hit list. He went on to say that the Man Group's greatest expense are the "expensive fund managers" inside the building.

Panera CEO Ron Shaich says robots will eventually replace his workers. "Labor is going to go down," Shaich said in an earnings call Wednesday. "And as digital utilization goes up -- like the sun comes up in the morning -- it is going to continue to go up. You are seeing it happen in Panera today." Panera has been implementing technology like touch-screen ordering stations for customers, which allow them to bypass interacting with any human workers while dining at the restaurant. They could replace up to half the US workforce within the next decade or two, according to a Bloomberg report published last year.

The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

The personal data you share with Facebook and other social platforms is a treasure trove of information that can, according to one UK startup, prove whether or not you would be a good tenant. Score Assured wants to take the data you share privately and publicly with social media and sell it to individuals, employers, and landlords. Tenant Assured, the first tool in the company's potential suite of data mining-and-selling resources, will connect with your social accounts and give landlords a report based on your data. The company says it uses machine learning software to predict what your data means--from your personality to "financial stress." It also rates the "risk" you would be as a tenant.

"The emerging threat is: It is not the guy sitting in Bangalore but the robot next door which is going to take your job, and this creates enormous anxiety among the middle class. You can see this in the political dialogue that is taking place in the US as well as in the run-up to Brexit in Britain." What will happen to countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and India if that ladder for steady growth is removed, when its export-driven aspect is just taken away because industrialized countries can produce things just as cheaply? The worry is that if a large segment of the middle-class becomes disempowered and is looking for easy solutions in country after country, could it create conditions for more political turmoil? " asked Rajan. Rajan's statement is being taken seriously in India as well, because despite growing at a pace of almost 7.6% in 2015-16, the Labour Bureau reported that job growth had slumped to a six year low: only 100,100 million in 2015. Siri also tells 17.9 million jobless people in India.. How to address them!! https://t.co/PhzLxP3GWZ However, Secretary of Economic Affairs Shaktikanta Das told Sputnik, "I will not go into the numbers, but when the manufacturing, industry and services sectors are growing then I think it's a positive development.

Situ8ed, founded in December 2015, based in Grenoble in the heart of the French Alps, and hosted by INRIA in their Rhone Alpes research centre. We're using situation modelling techniques pioneered by one of our founders to recognize real-world situations for smartphone users. Key to our products is the use the latest signal processing and machine learning techniques. Key to our value proposition is the protection of confidential data. We're developing an SDK for application developers (for Android and IOS) with cloud-based services for managing the installed base.

There is no need to worry about whether robots might start taking our jobs. Three of the world's 10 largest employers are already replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots: That is likely the tip of the iceberg. This deliberately scruffy chart from CSLA of the 10 largest global employers shows the world's biggest workforces shows the potential for axing workers in favour of machines: Of those 10, only the UK's National Health Service - with its massive army of doctors and nurses doing unrepetitive, unique tasks - looks like hostile territory for robots. The other nine are rich with rote, repetitive tasks that might be better performed by software. Foxconn's 60,000 robots are only a small fraction of its 1.3 million total workers.