Are AI Machines Making Humans Obsolete?

Breakthroughs in technology are bound to happen. If human history has shown anything then that technological advancements are an essential driving force of human culture and that societies that stop to innovate will fall behind. Humans have always been fascinated by machines and attempted to invent ever better ones that could take over more and more tasks that otherwise required human labor, from the early cranes in Mesopotamia, to the power loom, steam engine, all the way to the first industrial robots (such as welding robots in the automotive industry), to modern day aircraft, spacecraft, self-driving cars, and other kinds of autonomous machines. While machines initially were nothing but prostheses, augmenting and extending our own limited actuation capabilities, as they had to be operated by humans, automation introduced self-sufficient machines that replaced human control with artificial, albeit limited control systems that allowed for the performance of simple repeated tasks.