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Dr. Lynne Parker is leading a new initiative at the University of Tennessee focusing on artificial intelligence. Parker believes AI can play a major role in agriculture.
Amy Beckham
Artificial Intelligence in agriculture Hello there and welcome to Tennessee Home and Farm Radio. I’m Amy Beckham.
Dr. Lynne Parker
I’m leading a new initiative at UT. It’s really for the state as a whole to help us with developing AI across the state. So it’s a research and education initiative with the goal of helping make sure that Tennessee becomes a leader in the data intensive knowledge economy.
Amy Beckham
Dr. Lynn Parker has been with the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for more than 20 years and is an expert on distributed and intelligent robot systems, human robot interaction and AI or artificial intelligence. She explains more how UT is focused on this initiative.
Dr. Lynne Parker
Kind of embracing our land grant mission of helping the state as a whole. So it’s educational institutions across the state, its industry across the state and its community organizations as well on how we can all work together to help each other navigate this new transformation that’s coming along because of AI.
Amy Beckham
Through the years technology and agriculture has drastically changed. And Dr. Parker says agriculture can be an industry where AI flourishes and benefits farmers.
Dr. Lynne Parker
There are so many applications of AI in agriculture. And I think what we’ll see is that they’re going to be able to increase productivity, I think it will reduce cost, it will also help with a lot of the labor shortages that many farmers are experiencing. So there are a lot of different kinds of benefits to AI in agriculture and so many different kinds of use cases.
Amy Beckham
It’s also safe to say that many have concerns about this new technology and Dr. Parker provides some insight and positive thinking.
Dr. Lynne Parker
AI like any technology has both positive uses and negative uses. And I think we just have to learn how to experience the benefits of these technologies, while at the same time being responsible with them and coming up with the right governance mechanisms that make sure that we don’t experience those negative arms. What scares a lot of people is what we don’t know. So there’s a lot of conversations now in the policy world about how do we approach artificial intelligence and provide the right governance around it to make sure that those negative consequences don’t come to fruition.
Amy Beckham
For Tennessee Home and Farm Radio. I’m Amy Beckham.
