I can relate to this. I have had some more rewarding travel experiences in Europe on short work trips, than I have in similar places as a tourist. I think its a combination of better connections with locals and a reason to be there beyond just looking at things.
As someone who has had a bit to do with safety critical software in agricultural machinery, and I am sure to any one in any other regulated industry this sounds crazy. The regulation in many industries for software that can kill is onerous, python on Android for any safety related code in other industries would be the punch line of a joke.
What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money on, than actually taking their money.
The plumber example is a good one. All the AI breakthroughs you read about seem to have simple "IO" so to speak. Even a self driving car while a challenging task, is reasonably well constrained, an effective solution might be possible with just cameras, throttle, brake and steer angle.
A robot I can call about a plumbing problem, that can realize it needs to dig up a pipe in the front lawn, successfully dig up the pipe in the front lawn and fix a leak. Not to mention the rest of the things a plumber does. Now that is hard task and I can't see it being solved any time soon.
Any job that has difficult "IO" is a long way from automation in my mind.
In dry parts of the world herbicide use can significantly increase yield. Where I live in Australia a lot of broad-acre farming is "no-till". A field is seeded directly into stubble of the previous crop without mechanical tilling or weeding. Avoiding turning the soil retains moisture and stops top-soil blowing away. We recently had a fire come through near where I live and farmers were remarking they "hadn't seen their soil in years", and were concerned about losing the soil and moisture advantage they had gained over the years. Herbicide use is certainly not just a labor saver, it does open up different ways of farming.
“This difference compounds every year; over a decade, they can produce 30 times more than the rest, with the same number of employees.”
I am not sure if the math works out here. Unless they have also found a way to reinvest the output of this 40% extra productivity into more individual productivity which would be the real story.
I imagine this came from 1.4^10 = 28.9. This might make sense if they used the proceeds of the extra productivity to get more employees with equal productivity and so on..