GETTY IMAGESLISTEN, YOU’RE KINDA spooked about the rise of artificial intelligence, and I get that. It’s a tremendously powerful technology that promises to transform the very nature of work, inevitably leading to the automation of certain white-collar jobs. Like maybe mine, for instance. But AI also promises to make human labor smarter and more efficient, even something as traditional as small-scale farming. To that end, researchers have developed a smartphone-based program that can automatically detect diseases in the cassava plant—the most widely grown root crop on Earth—with darn near 100 percent accuracy. It’s a glimpse at a future in which farmers in the developing world trade the expertise of a handful of specialists for increasingly omnipresent and powerful technology.via