15. Go Green

As of right now, the human population is ballooning and is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. As you can imagine, that is a lot of people for the planet to support as it is not growing along with the population. The planet is expected to provide food for the entire population, but that may prove to be difficult given that the population is exponentially increasing. Also, consider water shortages and droughts and we will definitely have more problems in trying to grow food to feed ourselves. It will wage war amongst humans and soon enough, we will die off and what will be left is an apocalyptic world; that’s worst case scenario. Best case is that we find a way to remedy and prevent any food or water shortages with the help of technology!
The machines have arrived and begun the Green Revolution. Through advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the agriculture industry has made strides in maintaining their crops in good conditions. In addition to good crop yield, they are able to save water, make better decisions for harvesting, and detect crops with diseases and remove them immediately. These are only a few of the things that the use of artificial intelligence has helped remedy and improve in the agriculture industry.
As mentioned in the article linked below, deep learning is a powerful method of computing for software developers to use to train the computer what to do as opposed to just telling it specific commands to execute. An example of deep learning in agriculture is feeding a computer photos of diseased and healthy plants and labeling them accordingly. These photos help it learn what healthy and diseased plants look like; therefore, when a farmer wants to see if his plant is diseased, he can simply snap a photo of it, have it processed through the disease detection software, and then be given the results on whether is is diseased or not. From there on, the farmer is able to make a decision on the plant and can improve his crop yield.
Pretty soon, the fields will be filled with these robots that help farmers do a better job and will improve the agriculture industry. Imagine that, the Green Revolution led by the robots.
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/future-humanitys-food-supply-hands-ai/