As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? “I’ve sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,” the FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf recently confessed. That seemed right. There are some things the computers just can’t do.

The next morning the FT published “The gardens that AI grew”, describing intelligently automated drip irrigation, pest detectors, laser scarecrow systems and a solar-powered weeding robot. Oof.

It’s not entirely clear how much the laser scarecrow and the robot weeder really will threaten the jobs of human gardeners, but the prospect reminds us that there is a distinction between a job and a task. Most jobs are bundles of interconnected tasks.