{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Leadership for the Physical AI Age","title":"Ep 14: Physical AI Comes to the Farm: Melissa Clark-Reynolds on Autonomy and Ownership","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1852,"description":"Farming is where physical AI stops being about self driving cars.\nMelissa Clark-Reynolds ONZM is one of New Zealand's most recognized futurists, and the room she walks into is not the one you would expect. She sits on the board of Wētā Workshop. She was Deputy Chair of Radio New Zealand, Chair of Alpine Energy, and the first independent director in the history of Beef and Lamb New Zealand. She was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2015 for services to technology, after twenty five years as an entrepreneur and CEO, including building a virtual world that reached close to a million players. She trained as a futurist at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, the School of International Futures in the UK, and with Clayton Christensen at Harvard. She teaches governance and disruptive business models for the New Zealand Institute of Directors.\nShe has also been early to this before. She started coding in high school and was the only person on either track of her US master's, engineering and planning on one side and epidemiology on the other, who could write code. That got her modeling pollution flows and the movement of pandemics in the 1980s. Her point about that era: the hard part was not the math, it was that there was no language yet to explain what she was doing.\nShe thinks physical AI is in exactly that place now.\nShe joins Titto Thomas and Nick Shelton to explain where autonomy is actually landing on farms, and the episode turns on a decision one of the world's largest equipment makers took in 2016: a corporate strategy stating they no longer wanted to sell hardware. The company famous for tractors did not want to sell tractors. What they wanted was to operate any of their equipment from anywhere, which meant digitizing farmland and betting enormously on autonomy. Her read: a new technology almost never succeeds until the operating and business model changes with it.\nThen the counterexample. A startup built electric autonomous tractors,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Ihrz8HSnPRaMTVxRNvisLmWsNDNh5xUG7H6qCEdVfDQ/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81MTgw/ZGIxM2UxOTE2ZGRl/OGFhMGE5Y2JhOTFh/ZGUwOC53ZWJw.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}