Actually, all it means is being a skilled worker working with hands.

And yes, there is quite a lot of skill in digging. Ask anyone who served in a military, and had to learn how to dig trenches by hand.

I have no idea how you jumped from "microsoft lies" to "you made up [thing that is currently happening and well documented]"

You appear incapable of reading your own quote. "A skilled worker who makes object partly by hand".

The answer to your question is "yes". In fact a lot of skilled asphalt workers have a lot more skill in their craft than the average code monkey who fears losing his job to AI.

But that's because code monkeys losing their jobs to AI are bottom feeders in their field.

Let me guess. You think "artisanal" means "hobbyist", because, and I quote myself:

>Overall, this is very much "but current day tech level is baseline from which all my views come, and I have no idea how anything below that tech level works" level of privileged babble.

And surely only people who would engage in artisanal things are rich twats doing a silly hobby, not because there's some usefulness in artisanal work. You know this because you garden for fun, and don't even know where gardening originates.

I can point you the way out of your ivory tower of "it's the current year and nothing below current year's latest technology is relevant to work", and into reality. I cannot make you walk the stairs down, open the door and walk through it.

So do you, and so do I, and so does every single human being on the planet.

So?

This is no different from having all the technical debt from needing completely novel maintenance and logistics networks and novel pollution types from moving from horse powered economy to oil powered one.

We just take care of the novel problems as they come up, and we're way, WAAAAY better off because we moved off horses to oil.

It's rare to read someone so utterly disconnected from reality in his ivory tower as this spiel. Let's get into it.

1. Artisanal digging is still a thing. It's when you have to be really gentle with digging. Digging around tree roots you're not supposed to touch for example. Or very small scale applications, like digging a planting hole in a yard for gardening purposes.
For smaller holes, there are smaller excavators, with smaller attachments. Smallest digging attachments for those are smaller than large shovels. Because there's still a massive advantage to having a tireless, strong hydraulic arm instead of an easily tired, weak organic one.
2. Gardening's purpose is to generate food (like most things we invented out of necessity, we later adopted for some decorative etc use when it became useless for its primary purpose). It's the initial way we invented to grow food. Farming came much later.
There are still people in the world today that practice it for original purpose. Typically in places where logistics are difficult to get food from outside in (in terms of cost vs ability to generate wealth on site, i.e. imported food is too expensive while time worked is exceptionally cheap). Gardening essentially involves extreme attention and work time expenditure to plants in a small scale, typically featuring non-monoculture growth that would be extremely inefficient in terms of produce gained per surface if not for outlandish amount of work given to each plant on individual level. Essentially gardening is very efficient on per plant level, greater than farming. But it doesn't scale, so we invented farming to grow food at scale with far less work per plant.

Funnily enough, AI farming's biggest promise is actually going to gardening but at farming scale. Because AI is making per plant work so cheap, we can actually afford to garden at scale. I.e. not only do we get efficiencies of scale, but also efficiencies of being able to provide constant individualized care to each plant, instead of field as a much larger unit only.

Overall, this is very much "but current day tech level is baseline from which all my views come, and I have no idea how anything below that tech level works" level of privileged babble. Stop and thinking about how we got where we are today. Pick up some books on the subject. It's fascinating, and it will explain to you why and how AI is taking over those tasks. It's not some unique thing. It's just one rapid jump upwards in efficiency among countless such jumps in history of our species.

"People avoid new thing, because they tried it without relevant skillset, and it didn't work".

Yes. This happens all the time. If such "people" are employed, this is where you tell them to learn necessary skills so it works next time. If they refuse, this is where you terminate their employment, and look to hire people to have the relevant skillset to replace them.

Btw, have you seen the IT job market right now, who's being hunted by recruiters with hilarious signing bonuses and salaries, and who's struggling to get callbacks?

Because there's still use for artisanal digging.

Same reason why there's still gardening, millenia after farming has been invented. It's way less efficient, utterly useless at scale, but there are edge cases where excavator is just too big and too inaccurate for the job.

Microsoft.

That's what naysayers are trying to spin it as, and yet for much of the digging of that specific type, replacement with excavators has already happened.

They're just early, and somewhat unreliable excavators, so you need a specific skill set to operate and maintain them. But they're way, WAY more efficient than shovels.

Superintelligence might be a ways off.

Close but not quite.

This is "I know you're proficient with a shovel, but excavators have been a thing for a couple of years. Time to learn how to operate them, and do the same job you could do with a shovel in a week in an hour with an excavator."

Sounds ripe for a class action lawsuit.