The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

In 1837, John Deere was a blacksmith working in Grand Detour, Illinois. This was prairie country, with its dense black soil and wide-open spaces. It had potential as some of the world’s best arable land—great for crops but incredibly tough to plow. Then one day Deere saw a broken steel saw at a mill. Steel being scarce, he took his find home and fashioned the blade into a plow. Strong and smooth, steel was the perfect material for plowing through the dense, sticky soil. Although others had seen steel as an alternative to the coarser iron plows, Deere’s breakthrough was to ramp up mass production. Before long farmers from across the Midwest were flocking to his workshop. His invention opened the prairie to a flood of settlers. The Midwest duly became the breadbasket of the world; John Deere quickly became synonymous with agriculture; and a techno-geographic revolution was instigated. The John Deere company still makes agricultural technology today. You might be thinking tractors, sprinklers, and combines, and it’s true that John Deere does make all these things. Increasingly, though, the company builds robots. The future of agriculture, as John Deere sees it, involves autonomous tractors and combines that operate independently, following a field’s GPS coordinates and using an array of sensors to make automatic, real-time alterations to harvesting, maximizing yield and minimizing waste. The company is producing robots that can plant, tend, and harvest crops, with levels of p...

Steel to Silicon: John Deere and the Robot Farm