Humans ARE inferior to machines - in some areas. I can't fly as well as an airplane or cut steel as well as a lathe, therefore someone who needs flying or cutting steel would be better off by using a machine instead of me.

What would the alternative be? Force businesses to hire me to "do my best" to fly people around?

Will this create social problems if / when machines are better than humans at everything? Sure, just like it happened in each field once machines were better at something - starting with the sewing machines and the luddites, if I'm not mistaken.

I do believe that the final result will be a Star-Trek-ish society where everybody has access to most things for free, and where everyone works only if they want to; however, I don't believe it will be easy to get there.

Machines are superior sometimes, you're right (and for the best of us, that's for sure). But that's not my point. My point is that we shouldn't compare machines to men. Because too often one compares the perceived characteristics of men (like too expensive, wanting too much, having a consciousness, having babies,...) to other characteristics of machines, logically concluding that men are more troubles than machines.

Fact is that right now, in every media, machines are presented as a threat to employment of men. By presenting it as such, media imply the fact that for employment, machines are better. At the same time, governments, spend most of their time fighining against unemployment, which sort of criminalize people who don't get a job (they don' look hard enough, they're not flexible enough).

So all of this lead to a big problem : people don't get job and it's their fault and, moreover, for the simpler jobs, men are inferior to machines. So basically, we show men under a very dim light. That's what I see all around.

Now, if you tell me that machines will remove the hard part of some jobs (like heavy lifting, working in polluted environement, etc) and, at the same time, the benefits made by those who have machines ('cos machine are cheaper than men) are fully redistributed (save for capex) to those who lost their job, then we can have a talk.

Oh the things I could say...

There are probably things you don't even immagine to pay for, that are now done by machines, and that used to be performed by humans.

Think of circuit-switching telphony, when you used to say "operator, connect me with number xyz-xxx" and someone on the other side would phisically create a connection between you and someone else to talk.

Consider mail delivery. There used to be a milkman. Mail was only paper.

A lot of stuff.

On the same planet, self driving cars are about to be easily available, no more drivers or cab drivers, amazon has robots doing most of the heavy lifting (quite literally) but we enjoy these other things, and do not complain about anything because they're cool, i guess.

I cannot wait for this thread to be featured on n-gate.

with the runaway growth of telecoms in the early years manual operators had to be automated to some extent quite early on as there would physically not be enough workers to staff all the manual boards

The primary problem with automation is temporary displacement of workers. There needs to be a mechanism to connect skill demand to people otherwise people end up in low skill jobs.

>If machines are to rule, then we have to change the way we redistribute the worth they produce.

In theory if there is enough competition the price of the good decreases through automation.

Imagine you're a business selling clothing where 50% of the cost is labor and the rest are materials. You now buy a machine that replaces the labor cost with a 10% robot cost. You make 40% profit on everything you sell. Someone else builds a factory and sells the same good for 70% of the price. Consumers now have more money available to spend on other goods that are more "labor" intensive.

Unfortunately in practice we have monopolies/oligopolies everywhere.

>>> Unfortunately in practice we have monopolies/oligopolies everywhere.

Exactly.

And to me robotics is so capital intensive that you'll inevitably have such monopolies (like in oil industry).

That's why I don't like when people look only the tool instead of the people affected by the tool (be they on on good or bad side of it).

Men are also inferior to machines when it comes to farm work, but judging from your comment you'd presumably like to go back to the good old days when over 50% of the population worked on farms.

Or the really good old days when 97% worked in agriculture...

Only in times of peace.

(To nitpick on myself, it could be argued that war campaigns were also mostly agricultural work: they were just harvesting other people's fields)

No. My problem is not automation/mechanization, I'm all for that. My point is that, if we mechanizes, who pays the bill for lost/relocated jobs ?

US agricultural jobs dropped from 70% to 20% in eighty years.

50% of careers gone within one lifetime. And the US did better then ever.

Maybe we should value humans beyond the labor they can fulfill.

We already do, it's just not anywhere close to evenly distributed.

Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton did no actual work, yet made a lucrative living, even in their late teens.

Almost everyone has personal family+friends that they value in ways other than needing their labor. But it doesn't scale. People have a Dunbar number of somewhere a little (perhaps a lot) over ~140, but nowhere near a nation-state population.

I think there are more than 3k adults in the entire US that can "create and maintain machines".