The robots have arrived in California's fields. This summer, a self-driving tractor was spotted working rows of vines in Napa valley. Described as resembling a "souped-up golf cart", the tractor runs on an electric battery and can be operated remotely with an app. Farther south, strawberry harvesting robots have been picking fruit. Complete with wheels, clipper-tipped arms and a catchment tray, its maker claims the machine can pick almost as many berries as a human with 95% accuracy.

In the mid-twentieth century when the computer and its applications were starting to bring changes to the world, sociologist David Reisman had something stuck in his mind. He wondered what people would do once machine automation comes to effect and humans have no compulsion to do daily physical chores and strain their brain to come up with solutions. He was excited to see what people would do with all the free time. More than half a century later when the world has exactly what Reisman wondered, humans are still working on a full-time scale. Work alleviated by industrious machines such as robotics systems has only freed humans to create more elaborate new tasks to be laboured over.

The Mid-twentieth century sociologist David Reisman was perhaps the first to wonder with unease what people would do with all of their free time once the encroaching machine automation of the 1960s liberated humans from their menial chores and decision-making. His prosperous, if anxious, vision of the future only half came to pass however, as the complexities of life expanded to continually fill the days of both man and machine. Work alleviated by industrious machines, such as robotics systems, in the ensuing decades only freed humans to create increasingly elaborate new tasks to be labored over. Rather than give us more free time, the machines gave us more time to work. Machine Learning Today, the primary man-made assistants helping humans with their work are decreasingly likely to take the form of an assembly line of robot limbs or the robotic butlers first dreamed up during the era of the Space Race.

New York City-based HealthReveal, which uses remote monitoring and data analytics to help payers and providers make sure patients get the treatments that line up with evidentiary guidelines, has raised $10.8 million in first-round funding. The round was led by GE Ventures with contributions from Greycroft Partners, Flare Capital Partners, and Manatt Ventures. HealthReveal was founded by CEO Dr. Lonny Reisman, who previously founded ActiveHealth Management and sold it to Aetna for $400 million. He then served as Aetna's CMO for nearly a decade. "I think everybody agrees that some 86 percent of medical costs are associated with complications from chronic disease, things like strokes and amputations and end-stage renal disease and end-stage cancer, which is obviously awful for the patient but also very costly," Reisman told MobiHealthNews in an interview.