I've always loved this story. Reading it now, though, it's funny that it was written by the guy most famous for his robot stories. They seem like a pretty glaring omission. If you could program the job skills and knowledge onto a human brain, why not a positronic one? All the non-creative jobs would just end up being automated.
Which is basically the situation we're heading towards now in any case. Pretty prescient, I suppose.
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?
If you could program the job skills and knowledge onto a human brain, why not a positronic one? All the non-creative jobs would just end up being automated.
I find it possible that they are, and that the work done by the non-elite is largely unused in practical applications, but they're still encouraged to do it for two reasons: (1) it gives them something to do, and (2) the competitions (Olympics) give a model for elite human performance that the upper-class technicians and academics then automate.
While it's not strictly answered as to why these competitions are called "Olympics", the general sense of sport is an activity from a previous time. We don't need archers to defend castles or hunt boars, or runners to carry messages at 8 miles per hour when we have cell phones, but there's something innate about the sports that makes us enjoy partaking and (for some) competing and spectating.
The activity of the other 99.999% isn't needed on the front lines, but it's important for keeping human skills and knowledge sharp and so the 0.001% (assuming that the reveal at the end is a reliable source, and it may or may not be) who can be original thinkers have some basis for what to improve and what behaviors the machines need to replicate.
Which is basically the situation we're heading towards now in any case. Pretty prescient, I suppose.