Far-side logistics favored machines before humans for a simple reason. The work was relentless, local, and unforgiving.
Transport, excavation, repair, routing, and inventory balancing had to continue across a landscape where delays amplified quickly and exposed mistakes could become system-wide liabilities. Human crews remained essential, but they were expensive to scale and difficult to place everywhere the work demanded attention. Machines, by contrast, could be distributed earlier, replaced more modularly, and coordinated at higher density around repetitive tasks that still required real judgment.
This does not mean the far side was built by mindless automation. It means the environment rewarded labor that could remain embedded in the system full time. Machines could live closer to the work, monitor more interfaces at once, and respond to subtle maintenance drift before it reached human-visible failure. Once that advantage compounded, labor planning changed permanently.
Koblie’s later social structure grew out of this asymmetry. A colony built under those conditions was always more likely to become machine-majority than human-majority, not because humans were absent, but because machines fit the logistics regime better from the start.