Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.
That depends on how you look at it. From the perspective of meat machines, sure. But from the perspective of general intelligences, which have some ancestry in meat machines, not at all. Just something that happened way back when. Like electrical engineering.
Disclaimer: I played with a Da Vinci prototype sewing grapes but I'm definitely no surgeon. My hands shake more than someone with Parkinson's. I cannot fathom subsequent generations of refinements in steadier hands with surgical experience. Clarke's third law applies here. Although, I wonder before how long AI and mechatronics will receive credit for simple veterinary surgeries as a testbed on the path to a truly miraculous, sci-fi "surgical chamber".
"I can totally reach into the back of this gigantic, flesh eating machine to move that widget a little bit to the right. Management might give me a raise for saving them money!" -famous last words of a former factory worker.
“Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”
- Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
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