A robot is bent over in ankle-deep paddy water, planting rice seedlings by hand.
Look at the field. Flooded rows behind it, mud clouding the water, a bundle of green shoots in its grip. It stoops, plants, steps back, stoops again.
Rice transplanting is the oldest backbreaking job on Earth. Bent 90 degrees for 8 hours, in standing water, in the heat. It's why farmers in Asia are crippled by 50 and why the average Chinese rice farmer is now 57.
Machines exist. They cost $30,000 and only work on flat, uniform plots. Half the world's paddies are terraced, muddy, irregular - human-shaped problems.
So they sent something human-shaped.
The mud that broke 4,000 years of spines just met something without one.