[darkmighty]

Well, it might be cheaper to use a biological brain than to use a computer for many tasks, even a few centuries into the future. We're incredibly good at high level abstraction and problem solving. We're pretty flexible: you can "program" us with a few verbal instructions to do an enormous range of tasks and we fill in the gaps in the instructions. All that for the low price of US$10,000! (average cost of financing a human to adult age?)

I of course agree that human soldering is will hardly remain crucial to manufacturing.

That is, provided we actually needed to compete with robots at all (will depend on the demographic and resource situation of the future). It's likely most humans will stick to the most pleasurable tasks and only a few strategic activities will keep being rewarded for their raw productive value.

In other words, demography and resources equal, we're not really competing with move advanced tools: they should be just free our time and improving quality of life, provided we have some adequate scheme for distribution of resources.

That for me is one of the most interesting aspects to be explored by incoming changes: how will we manage our economy (among humans), and how will we manage our relation with machines as they gradually become more proficient at higher and higher level tasks? Will our definition of 'human' change in the process?