There is so much technology emerging, from the metaverse to AI to gene editing, that it can be overwhelming. Yet the CTO who fails to keep an eye on what's around the corner could find their business disrupted – or even kaput When the then head of IT at US VHS rental chain Blockbuster first read about an experimental video-on-demand technology being trialled in London at the beginning of the 1990s, did it cross their mind that this would eventually destroy their business? Or if the CEO of monolithic US bookstore chain Borders first read about an upstart online bookseller called Amazon getting going in 1994, could they have foreseen themselves going bankrupt 17 years later? The problem is that with so much emerging technology, how can you focus on the technologies which will affect your business the most? All we can do is sketch out the technologies we believe will have the most profound effect on business for you.

Advocates of robotically assisted prostatectomy argue that the procedure brings a number of advantages. Among them: less blood loss, shorter stays in the hospital and faster recovery times. However, it isn't clear that the robotically assisted procedures provide an advantage when it comes to survival rates and urinary and erection problems. And it costs significantly more. Ashutosh Tewari, system chairman of the department of urology at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, believes the robotic surgery is better.

In my last blog post, I introduced readers to William Grey Walter (1910 – 1977), a renowned neurophysiologist, cybernetician, and robotician. His futuristic aim was to construct mechanical models--robots--that were capable of realistically simulating the behavior of living beings. Grey Walter's most famous robotic creations were his Cybernetic Tortoises. Elmer and Elsie, his first two robots, were constructed between 1948 and 1949. They appeared to exhibit intelligent action: they were goal-directed (they moved toward light and stopped doing so when they reached the light) and they avoided obstacles that blocked their way to the goal. In a truly remarkable coincidence, robotic tortoises have very recently made the news!

Robotic food manufacturing is a rising trend in the food industry. The value of the global food automation industry is expected to rise to $2.5 billion by 2022. In this article, we introduce six robotic applications in food processing. As we discussed in our previous article on the food industry, food manufacturing can be separated into two stages: primary food processing and secondary food processing. Primary processing involves handling raw food products, which are cleaned, sorted, chopped, packaged, etc.

"Plant breeding is another interesting application we're pursuing, where robotically gathered plant phenotype data can be collected over much larger breeding experiments that current manual measurement techniques allow," said Kantor. "Machine learning tools can then combine the collected phenotype data with genetic and environmental data to help a breeders and geneticists better understand the relationships between genetics, environment, and plant performance." "This in turn accelerates the breeding process, allowing breeders to evaluate many more plants each season so that they can more quickly select for desirable traits such as yield or disease resistance," adds Kantor. Kantor says this kind of accelerated breeding program could have significant benefit in the developing world such as Subsaharan Africa. The FarmView initiative wants to develop inexpensive robotic systems that small- to medium-scale growers can afford to implement.

The great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said, "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." This phrase represented a challenge to Lord John Browne, who has made a career of predicting global business trends. In his book, Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society, Browne examines three current trends and how they predict our global economic future. First is artificial intelligence: will automation increase to the point where companies themselves behave robotically? And what will the impact of automation be on workers and their communities?