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.

It’s hard not to get philosophical. Or judgmental — I’m genuinely struggling with the idea that we’ll soon fully merge with machines.

As technology gains human level sentience, I need to evolve my mindset. What if my daughter wants to marry an algorithm? Can I have dinner with its parents? Can we expect to see anti robot-bullying campaigns soon? Or a reworked cover of Macklemore’s, “SIM love?”

I joke because I’m conflicted. I’m genuinely a bit freaked at the idea that humans and machines are already so inexorably linked. And I firmly believe that things like the wearables industry are simply intermediary technologies to mentally prepare us for our inevitable union with machines. They help reveal the personal data that’s currently invisible in our lives while providing a thin, albeit fashionable, buffer between the time devices will be on our skin versus within.

My goal here is to confront my unease with this union while my identity is largely located in my cortex rather that the cloud. I’m not anti-robot, as I thought I might be in the past. But the reality of transcendence with technology shouldn’t be taken lightly, even if it is inevitable.

The resolve to evolve

“What it means to be human and the evolution of humanity is changing so rapidly that we’re kind of at a different stage of being human. There’s not a lot of distinction between the natural and artificial any more,” says Colin Marchon, an NYU student and documentary filmmaker.

We met at the recent Augmented World Expo in Brooklyn where I was on a panel discussing the future of Augmented Reality. Colin, 20, is currently working on a thesis film called The Transhuman Identity to be completed in late 2014. He grew up in Silicon Valley with parents in the tech industry. Already active on messaging boards by age seven, he noted in our interview that he’s part of the first generation to have all of his life take place alongside, or within, the Internet.

“I’m used to experiencing my life being almost fully documented and my kids could have access to my entire history since I was a teenager,” Marchon said. In my experience, my younger friends and relatives are way more savvy about their privacy and digital lives than my friends who are over thirty. It makes sense that overtly merging with technology would not be as freaky to them as it is to me and my peers.

The nature of intimacy is evolving along with technology. Do you raise your eyebrows at friends who met via a dating service? I did the first time a friend told me she met her life’s love in an old-school, AOL-era chatroom. I thought it was remarkably mature that they dated via phone and computer for months without meeting in person, but felt it was a risky trend at the time. Now I don’t.

"What does it say about how we’re evolving, that more women would rather give up sex than their iPhones?” asks Ramona Pringle, an assistant professor at Ryerson Unversity’s RTA School of Media, and the director and producer Avatar Secrets, an interactive iPad experience exploring the complexities of human connection in the wired world. The quote is from a survey of more than 3,500 women where 48% said their smartphone was more important to them than intimacy with another person.

Where at first glance it may seem callous for these women to prefer silicon to sex, who are we to judge?

Perhaps soon we’ll get used to people declaring overt relationships with their smartphones, which will make texting your lover into something akin to a Jean Paul Sartre play. What if you have to carry a different device at work than your personal device? Will your mobile lover get jealous? Maybe start hitting on your Nest while you’re at work?

“We talk about the future as if these robotic devices are going to be ‘other,’” noted Pringle in our interview, in terms of how we see robots or technology as fundamentally separate from ourselves. But like most of us, she reports her iPhone could only be closer to her if it was embedded under her skin.

“Our phones are already becoming part of us. I rely on mine for everything, even knowing all the phone numbers of everyone I love that I don’t have memorized. So in essence, I’m the one becoming more of a robot, or cyborg, as my day to day life increasingly relies on this technology, and my next of kin becomes this mobile phone,” she said.

For myself, I barely remember my home phone number and would certainly be dead in the water to call my kids’ school or a local hospital if I couldn’t access my contacts or the Internet. If 911 weren’t only three numbers I likely would have forgotten it already.

The logic of the loss

“It’s counterintuitive in many ways, that as these services and devices improve and embed themselves deeper into our lives we notice them less.” Patrick Tucker is the author of, The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, technology editor for Defense One and editor-at-large for The Futurist magazine.

The book describes the idea of telemetry, and how the real-time conveying of signals, as in the case of multiple sensors being applied to our bodies in a hospital setting, is transforming our present age into the Naked, or purely visible, Future.

In our interview, I asked if the nature of this algorithmic lifestyle would rob us of anything central to our humanity. While Tucker feels we have yet to encounter a technology that has made this happen, he pointed out that, “Our sense of humanity can undergo a rapid evolution and this can be disorienting and alienating, creating a feeling of loss. What we’re talking about is a multiplication of humanity across different spaces, and that will feel very strange. But it doesn’t represent a permanent loss—it’s a doubling of humanity.”

I sympathize with this sense of loss. I do feel disoriented when looking around my living room and noting that my wife, son and daughter are all tethered to screens. I’m keenly aware of the almost chemical need to check my phone while listening to a family member speak, oftentimes missing what they’re saying while my eyes dart towards my phone. In these scenarios, I don’t know what a doubling of humanity will look like. Perhaps real-time notifications will only invade my consciousness with messages I’ve deemed important. But my current behaviors mirror addiction more than enlightenment.

“People are becoming anti-social. Before phones you were always thinking about what conversations you could make with someone else. Now many people prefer their phone over conversations with humans,” says Mrigaen Kapadia.

Kapadia and his wife co-founded a company, Mobifolio, and developed, BreakFree, an app aimed at controlling phone addiction. It monitors your mobile usage and tracks how addicted you are to your phone, registering how often you swipe to unlock your screen or which apps you use on a too-frequent basis.

When I asked Mrigaen if prolonged engagement with technology could be deemed personal preference as opposed to addiction, he cited a video showing two Japanese men in their thirties who chose to interact with virtual girlfriends instead of dealing with human ones. He cited it as a dangerous precedent. “We want to make people realize that human company is better than phone company,” he said.

But is this a universal truth? I recently wrote a book on the nature of technology and happiness and found a great deal of research showing that our intrinsic wellbeing does increase when we’re with our families, friends, or community. But who’s to say that community needs to be carbon versus silicon? Perhaps we’ll only prefer human company to machines until technology advances to the point where we can’t tell the difference. And odds are we’ll start to prefer cyborgian humans to the “real thing” because they’ll be programmable and will never get sick. We’ll get all the benefits of human interaction without a lot of our current struggles.

This idea still makes me feel wonky, but it may be my age. Colin, the NYU student, had a different take on the Japanese men's cyber-girlfriends: “It doesn’t matter that she lives in a computer—the woman makes him happy. Whether she’s biology or technology doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

The heart of being human

“Wisdom is seeing through false identities,” notes Vincent Horn, co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, the wildly popular podcast and now annual conference. “Wisdom is seeing through the ways in which we cling to conceptions of who we are and what the world is that are out of synch with how things are functioning.”

This insight from my interview with Vincent was particularly compelling. Like Patrick Tucker’s noting how change can bring a sense of alienation, perhaps my current sense of anxiety comes from clinging to a form of humanity that is now out of date. Today, the world functions almost more digitally than not, at least in the visible spectrum. But our consciousness is tied to our screens and data on an ever-expanding basis. It’s in this in-between space that I don’t know how to function. Horn points out that, “We can’t hold on to any particular thing – it changes the next instant. It’s when we do hold onto it, that it causes suffering and pain.”

After all my research into the Artificial Intelligence space, I’m still at a crossroads. I’m excited for some of the innovations that transcendence will bring, but have grown used to embracing my suffering as a key to personal growth. I struggle with the logic of algorithms becoming so advanced that people may not have time to naturally develop their own preferences. It feels like we’re close to the point where when examining our humanity, it’s not just that we don’t know who we are, but that we can’t. That still feels like a deep loss to me, and it’s one I’m not ready to give up just yet.