IF NOT WORKING WAS A TRAGEDY WE'D NOT PUT SO MUCH EFFORT INTO ACHIEVING IT:

[W]hat may be most frightening about the robots in our near future is that they'll highlight our own limitations and inadequacies.

That's already happening in the workplace, where robots are replacing more and more workers, particularly in manufacturing. Though we've had industrial robots for quite a while now (the first one, called Unimate, was put to work in a General Motors factory in 1961), the number of tasks they can do is rapidly increasing, and there are whole classes of human occupations that could disappear in the next decade or two. For instance, being a warehouse "picker" for a company like Amazon may be a dreadful job, but it's something that thousands of Americans do; before long that work will almost certainly be done by robots, with fewer and fewer humans involved. Robots are even writing news stories (though I think opinion writing is safe, at least for a while).

Whenever a worker gets displaced by a robot, it's a human tragedy, and we haven't yet figured out how we're going to deal with the millions of people who are unable to find work when their jobs have been mechanized. But the combination of technology and market forces makes it inevitable: As soon as a robot can do the same work just as well as a human can, it's only a question of when the robot becomes cheaper. And it shows that while the human may have done a perfectly fine job assembling widgets, he wasn't good at it so much as he was good at it for a human -- and now there's something superior.

Follow @brothersjudd