The ai story ....

You professionally dig with a shovel. The shovel is simple: sometimes you use small shovels, sometimes big ones. And then one wonderful day everyone goes crazy and starts writing that shovels are dead and everything urgently needs to be tractorized.

So of course you switch to an excavator — and it turns out this is no longer really about digging. It’s also about driving, and you have to refuel the thing, and there has to be at least some kind of road where you’re digging. The holes, for some reason, end up about five times bigger, but ten times faster. True, there’s a lot of dirt, but whatever — you can always cover it up later with soil and run a roller over it.

Sometimes the tractor starts digging in the wrong place or digs too deep and breaks pipes, but that happens rarely.

Then it turns out that tractors are expensive to buy, so you can only rent them — or build your own tractor factory from scratch.

And the rental company sometimes gives you a newer tractor that digs differently, or for the next half a year it just squeaks instead of digging, or you have to retrain yourself to learn how to drive it.

You’re happy, but you have to keep spending money: on fuel, on parts, and you also need a driving license, permits, inspections — and you think less and less about how to actually dig, and start learning a bit to be a mechanic.

And then you get a job and find out that there are tractors and excavators there, but they’re company-owned, and you’re not allowed to drive your own one because it’s unsafe and they’ll just fire you if they catch you. And the corporate excavator only digs trenches of a fixed width, that’s all. And sometimes it just stalls and blinks its headlights.

And it also turns out that some types of soil these miracle machines handle either very poorly or not at all, and companies often start choosing tractor-friendly plots of land — even though you can’t grow the plants you actually need there, but at least the tractors work great there.

And shovels start disappearing from sale. And in general the world stops digging and thinking about digging, and instead gets busy painting tractors and searching for fuel, because there isn’t enough diesel for everyone and for some reason its price suddenly starts rising.