The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is an annual convention in Las Vegas that showcases thousands of products and innovations in the world of technology from all over the planet. This year, Buffalo Toronto Public Media board member Dr. Philip Glick, a board-certified pediatric surgeon with over 35 years of experience, is attending the days-long CES. Over the course of the convention, Dr. Glick will be filing first-hand accounts of what he is seeing and hearing from CES.
Edition 2:
"By way of a little background, the Consumer Electronics Show started in 1967 as a small show in New York City and had about 1700 visitors. Shortly after that, the show moved to Las Vegas and has been there yearly since then.
This year, the show is billed as the largest consumer electronics show in the world, and there are over 175,000 people here in Las Vegas attending the show. The term Consumer Electronics Show is really a misnomer. It should really be CTS, the consumer trade show is more accurate, although there are a lot of electronic things here. A lot of the innovations here are technology, both software and hardware, not just electronics.
The mantra here at CES this year is "Dive into CES 2025". If you do that, be a good swimmer and take a big breath because there's much to see.
The CEO of the CTA is a man named Gary Shapiro who just wrote a book called Pivot or Die, which I started reading on the way out here on the airplane. Exemplary of the business strategy, Pivot or Die is on full stage here by John Deere Tractor. About five or six years ago, John Deere decided that they were going to move into autonomous vehicles and technology to not only vertically but also horizontally expand their business. They realized if civilization didn't come up with some new technologies, we'd never be able to feed the population of the world.
Currently, the population is 8 billion people and it's moving to 10 billion in the next ten years. So John Deere has made autonomous kits for the second generation tractors. You know, the average farmer is 58 years old and spends 12 to 18 hours a day working their farms and they just can't find enough labor to keep their farms going.
But with second-generation autonomy, they can take care of their own crops and their farm. They've done vertical expansion into orchards for all the valuable crops, especially in California. They've moved into quarrying to get precious metals for all these batteries that we need now. And there's just a lot of grass to cut in this world. John Deere is making these autonomous vehicles to make all of these processes easier."
-Dr. Philip Glick