“Whether it’s Bezos or Musk or Loon, somebody will crack the code and we will have connectivity on the farm to connect everything together, from grain bins to soil moisture probes,” he said.

Saik spoke at the Land Investment Expo in Des Moines. He told the group that “algorithm” will be the new word in every farmer’s vocabulary. Algorithms will be used in GEO mapping, remote sensing, and virtual reality technology.

He also said robots are well-suited for work that is dangerous, dirty, and dull—factors familiar in farming.

Saik said the labor shortage is critical in agriculture, and automation offers solutions.

“We can’t find good operators in remote areas where we live. Robotics will allow us to drop operating costs and reduce compaction.”

Saik defined this as his moonshot challenge: “Increase the profitability and sustainability of farmers globally by creating a brand-new connectivity challenge for agriculture.”

He used the example of hydraulic oil from his childhood on the farm. He would be covered in it when switching pieces on farm equipment. Today’s version of that is “digital hydraulic oil,” he said, because systems do not communicate with one another. “We need systems integrators to make this technology work on the farm.”

If farmers have bugs in their corn, a sick cow, a frozen tractor monitor, or a combine at an auction they cannot attend, they will approach that challenge technologically. Sensor devices and recognition software will tell a farmer where he has a problem and what the problem is without another human having to visit the farm.

Source: Successful Farming

Millions of low-paid workers’ lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires those who under-perform, with little human intervention.

“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors,” a law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, which was first reported by technology news site The Verge. Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for failing to meet productivity targets.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. Software already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, “sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive,” says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.

Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers’ speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In every case, results are shared in real time with employees and used to determine who is terminated.

Weeding out under-performing employees is a function of management, and the roughly 10 percent termination rate at the Amazon center in Baltimore is “not unusually high,” Larkin said.

He said automating the discipline process “makes an already difficult job seem even more inhuman and undesirable. Dealing with these tough situations is one of the key roles of managers.”

A spokeswoman for Amazon said that “no one is terminated, coached or developed by a system,” but rather “managers make final decisions on all personnel matters.”

Source: Wall Street Journal