Glenn Reynolds writes about robots replacing humans in just about everything. He makes a point at the end that I pretty much agree with.
Of course, at an arbitrarily high level of technology, everything can be done better by machines than by people. By that point, however, I suspect that people will be adopting some machine characteristics of their own: uploaded minds, computer-chip implants, etc., even as machines become more human-like, making the whole man/machine distinction somewhat beside the point. That raises its own set of problems of course…
I'm a big fan of Rodney Brooks, who runs the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. He wrote the same thing in his last book, that humans won't take a back seat to machines because we will always augment ourselves enough to stay one step ahead of them.
