The rise of machine intelligence in agriculture

Future generations will likely look back at the development of machine learning as a turning point. It certainly is convenient to dispense with keyboards and touchscreens in favor of using ordinary speech to tell your iPhone, Android or Alexa device what you want it to do. But machine learning's far more consequential contributions to society will be found in the fields of agriculture. Those contributions cannot come soon enough. By 2050 an estimated 9.7 billion people[1] are going to need to be fed, which means that farmers have to increase their output to cover the 200,000 people who are added to the global population each and every day.