Phone-Powered AI Spots Sick Plants With Remarkable Accuracy

Listen, you're kinda spooked about the rise of artificial intelligence, and I get that. It's a tremendously powerful technology that promises to transform the very nature of work, inevitably leading to the automation of certain white-collar jobs. But AI also promises to make human labor smarter and more efficient, even something as traditional as small-scale farming. To that end, researchers have developed a smartphone-based program that can automatically detect diseases in the cassava plant--the most widely grown root crop on Earth--with darn near 100 percent accuracy. The most impressive bit about the technology is that the neural network that powers it runs entirely on the smartphone, no cloud computing or hulking processors required, as the researchers detail in a preprint paper to be published in Frontiers in Plant Science.