Coming to Terms With Humanity's Inevitable Union With Machines

Our robot overlords are already here.

We’re just anthropomorphizing our technology in more subtle ways than we’d imagined in the past. We stigmatize Theodore Twombly, Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the movie, Her, as morally questionable when falling in love with his operating system, yet don’t find it adulterous when the last face we look at before falling asleep belongs to our smartphone versus our soulmate.

It’s time to come to grips with what it means to be human in a digital environment. That is, a fully digital or virtual environment. We can talk about unplugging from technology, but that behavior is more akin to minimizing an activity window while our relationship continues running in the background of our lives. Sensors in our phones and the innards of our globe monitor ubiquitously, broadcasting our unencrypted consciousness to the world. Read more...