Traptic, a strawberry-picking robot business, just raised $8.4 million in funding. Automation has a long history in agriculture. The tractor, for example, cut the time it took to produce 100 pounds of lint cotton by more than 15 times, from 42 to 2.5 hours, but there was still potential for improvement. According to Traptic, more than $200 billion worth of fruits and vegetables are still harvested by hand each year, and agriculture employs 27 percent of the world's population.

According to ARK's research, retraining will become more important as automation reshapes farming and the global economy. 2U, a renowned online education company, recently bought edX, an open online course provider founded by MIT and Harvard, a partnership that could help retrain workers in automated industries. Notably, overseas traffic accounts for 79 percent of edX's traffic. With 3,500 course offerings, the resulting business could train more than 50 million learners and 230 educational and corporate partners. Given the enormous advancements in automation currently available with artificial intelligence, we believe the number of 2U learners will increase by order of magnitude over the next five to ten years.