On a block in San Francisco's SoMa district, near LinkedIn's headquarters and dozens of startups, a 180-year-old company best-known for making tractors has a gleaming new Silicon Valley office. But inside, instead of building the latest app, John Deere is focused on how to use artificial intelligence to make farming equipment that can meet modern sustainability and food production challenges. John Deere Labs, which opened its doors in the spring, made its first major deal on September 6. The company spent $305 million to acquire Blue River Technology, a startup with computer vision and machine learning technology that can identify weeds–making it possible to spray herbicides only where they're needed. The technology reduces chemical use by about 95%, while also improving yield.

Your public school education exists, in large part, thanks to the Second Industrial Revolution. When the revolution took hold of America in the 1870s, 30 years after the end of the first, half of the US population still spent their days toiling in fields. Education was typically voluntary, assuming the family was wealthy enough to afford tutors or school fees, and usually reserved for boys. With the development of commercial fertilizer and the internal combustion engine, productivity exploded while the number of farmers dropped to less than two percent of the population. It lessened the demand for child labor which in turn led to increased support for compulsory education for both sexes.

If you are a weed, we have some somber news. John Deere, the farm equipment company that's been chasing autonomous technology for more than 20 years, has agreed to buy Blue River Technology, a startup that uses AI to automatically identify and spray herbicide on weeds. Blue River Technology makes a number of farm tools: an automatic precision weed-sprayer, a device that trims lettuce at scale, and software for drones to analyze crops. The company once considered using a Tesla coil to zap weeds, according to Willy Pell, Blue River's director of new technology, which is objectively a cool idea. John Deere's tractors have a level of autonomy today--some can steer themselves via help from GPS signals, while image sensors can determine the quality of grain during harvesting.

Farm equipment maker John Deere is banking on machine learning to change the way crops are grown, stumping up US$305 million (A$380 million) for a start-up in the space. Deere said it would "fully acquire" Blue River Technology but allow the 60-person company to remain in California "with an objective to continue its rapid growth and innovation with the same entrepreneurial spirit that has led to its success". The buyout is expected to close in September. Blue River Technology makes two "bots" armed with computer vision and machine learning that can be towed by a traditional tractor. The LettuceBot is used to recognise and remove unwanted lettuce seedlings in order to maximise the crop.

The program is a result of a $1.25 million gift from the private McCain Foundation.

Dutch designer Joris Laarman has built his career through emerging technologies like 3D printing and robotics. But as a student 15 years ago, he didn't even own a computer. "After my graduation I got a computer, which changed everything," he said in a phone interview. "My generation was the first to know what it was like before computers, but who also grew up with them." From open source furniture designs to a 3D-printed footbridge made from stainless steel, Laarman's work lies at the intersection of design and technology.

Space is indifferent to your suffering. And it certainly doesn't care how difficult it is for humans to get stuff done in the void: practical things like screwing in bolts and drinking water and 3-D printing replacement parts. But a company called Made in Space is indifferent to space's indifference. In a first, it's showed that it can 3-D print in a thermal vacuum chamber, which simulates the nastiness of space. It's a milestone in the outfit's ambitious Archinaut program, which hopes to launch a 3-D printer with robot arms into orbit.

Data-driven management has risen sharply from a decade ago, when Thomas Davenport wrote Competing on Analytics.Data is now the critical tool for managing many corporate functions, including marketing, pricing, supply chain, operations, and more. This movement is being further fueled by the promise of AI and machine learning, and by the ease of collecting and storing data about every facet of our daily lives. But has the pendulum swung too far? Are managers relying excessively on data to guide their decisions, abdicating their own knowledge and experience? One possible solution may be found in Agent-Based Simulation(ABS), a novel approach to solving complex business problems through computer simulations.

A three-storey house is being designed, planned and built predominately by robots and 3D printers.

A sleek mechanical arm plunges into a pool of what looks like milky gray ink in Carbon's lab in Redwood City, California. The black arm slowly moves upwards, pulling a latticed plastic cube out of the bath, shiny and dripping with ink: a large-scale model of the porous structure of bone. Joseph DeSimone, Carbon's CEO and cofounder, looks on. DeSimone, a polymer chemist, helped invent these machines, and he still gets a kick out of watching them work. It is a form of 3-D printing, but it's done in a novel way that is faster than previous techniques and works with many more types of plastics.