B efore drones hummed overhead. Before point clouds painted the world in millions of precise dots. Before software stitched reality into perfect digital twins. There was still just the jobsite. A raw, living thing of mud and steel, sweat and decisions made on the fly. My grandfather, Frank Sharp, ran Frank Sharp Construction in Swedesboro, New Jersey, through the hard years of the Great Depression. I still have an old black-and-white photograph of one of his sturdy dump truck

I magine a drone hovering silently over a pipeline in the desert. There’s no visible leak. No temperature spike. No audible stress in the...