The John Deere company is one of the leaders in agricultural machinery and has presented at the beginning of January at CES in Las Vegas a fully autonomous tractor model, it is the Model 8R that has a navigation system, six pairs of cameras and Artificial Intelligence help to carry out field work.
Different sensors can be attached to it to know the composition of the soil, etc ... and all this information is collected by the AI system to suggest modifications to the farmer.
The farmer has an APP on his mobile to communicate with the "system", but we have to think that the people in the field are not technical experts (in fact almost none of us are), and the more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to communicate with it.
That the automation of agricultural work is a fact is more than clear. There are already other tractors that move autonomously, but John Deere takes another step after having bought at least two robotics companies in recent years, and presents a definitive leap in the automation of the work of the field.
Farmers are left with the difficult job of being convinced, as a fully autonomous tractor is almost certain to exceed the cost of a million dollars, and is not easy to amortize. But it has the advantage that it can be shared among several users, and that by not needing a person to drive it, so the operating cost decreases.
As in the case of autonomous cars, it is undefined who is the "owner" of the information generated by the tractor. At the moment it seems that the manufacturer. And if that continues to be the case, farmers will be increasingly in their hands for the future.
The "problem" with these complex technologies and with Artificial Intelligence and its huge data capture, is that users are increasingly in the hands of the manufacturers of these systems, since we cannot handle such large volumes of data.
It remains to be seen how this problem will be solved, but in the meantime, companies continue to move forward and position themselves with more strength each day in the face of users who are increasingly weak and more dependent on them.
Make no mistake, technologies benefit the big guys the most.
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