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 Hey spreston- I was inspired by your post to go back and look for an article I read earlier this week on Slate, so I decided to respond in a comment instead of making my own post! Your question, "Would it be possible for people to be happy interacting with machines and robots and spending little time with other people?" is really relevant to this class and our discussion of the future of technology. Over at Slate.com, author Farhad Manjoo just started writing a new series called The Future of Innovation. The first article outlines Manjoo's plan to talk about how changing technology is going to affect our lives over the next decade or so, and the second article is what your robot opera post really reminded me of. It's about the way we incorporate new (specifically mobile) technologies into our lives and how we already spend so little time interacting with people (because of facebook, etc). The discussion of the digitization of parts of the real world, on page 2, is especially interesting because that's a way I hadn't thought of that technology will creep into and affect our daily lives. 

I haven't had a chance to check out the comments, but maybe that's a discussion that our class would like to get involved with!