Among the most obvious and some would say crucial ways in which machines have changed human life are in the area of work. Machines have made countless jobs and forms of work obsolete; they have been responsible for the creation of new jobs, and have made other kinds of labour much easier or less dangerous than they used to be. They have taken away work from humans, but they have also created new work. Most people are thankful that machines have made the exhausting toil that was the fate of most workers in the past a distant memory in most of the developed world.
Despite the advantages that machines have provided in terms of efficiency, decrease of toil, taking over of repetitive tasks, and – at least in theory – freeing up time for more "creative" work for humans, the machines have led to two basic problems for humans as well. These "down sides" of mechanization have led some of the world's greatest minds to regret the ascendency of the machine. The two most painful effects of the machine age, at least where work is concerned, have been (1) the replacement of humans by machines, putting endless generations of skilled labourers and craftspeople out of jobs and often leaving them destitute, and (2) the increasing readiness to see human beings in various jobs as human "machines," the expectation of machine-like work from non-machines, and the increasing tendency to treat human workers the same way we treat unthinking, unfeeling mechanical devices.
Both of these practices have typically led to greater profit for the businessmen and more affordable goods for at least some factions of humanity, but at the same time they have radically changed the fabric of human existence, and some even today would argue that the human cost of these advances has been grossly underestimated.