[mdpopescu]

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.

[wiz21c]

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.