You wake up to the sound of your smartphone's alarm clock. You grab it and click snooze... "5 more minutes", you think. But once those minutes pass, you need to get up. You grab the phone and take it to the bathroom. As you evacuate, you scroll through your recent feed. You get out for your morning exercise and synch your smartwatch to register your performance and vitals. You get home, jump in the shower listening to the latest news, podcast or gossip. At breakfast, you finish watching the previous night streaming episode or, you may check your emails, your calendar, messages or post replies. You may also synch up your activities with your siblings and partners. As you transit to your office, you keep updating yourself through your phone. You may call a friend and arrange for an unexpected dinner at the trendy local restaurant or make arrangements for a doctor or lawyer appointment. You may, as well, just listen to music or take pictures of the sun shining through the leaves of a tree. At the office, or place of work, your calendar and emails synch again in order to give you a clear picture of what you need to do. A meeting at 10h, a yoga lesson from 12h30 to 13h30, lunch at 14h, plumber call at 15h30 and at 17h you need to send that pdf presentation. At 18h sharp you need to leave to pick up your partner's dress for the dinner that night, at 20h15. Returning home, you scroll through the feed, boost a couple of sharp posts and update on the latest comments. While washing and getting setup for dinner, you play "cool dinner" suggested playlist and find yourself whistling to a track you love, that played just at the right moment. As you and your partner leave for dinner, you enter the restaurant's coordinates and find the fastest route. It will take 13mins, enough time to park and meet your friends outside. It is a lovely night, 21 degrees, 18% hummidity and 4% of clouds. Once in the restaurant, you scan the menu with the QR code. You make your meal and drink choices and proceed with catching up with your friends. In a few minutes, you are trading podcasts, showing videos or pictures. Ocasionally, a notification will pop up for an email, post reply or latest shopping deal and the natural "excuse me, i got to take this" occurs. In the end of the meal and after a delicious gastronomic experience, spite the clumsy waiter spilling half of the sauce in the floor, you decide to give the restaurant couple of stars. You drive home, again through the fastest route and land on the sofa for a late night chill. There is that latest episode, night show or movie to keep watching and you can crash on the sofa, your smartphone is already set for tomorrow.

While certainly speculative, i think this is a sort of reality that many are living. With the advent of the smart phone (also known as cellphone (a cell as in prison)), all sorts of apps have emerged to make our life "simpler, easier, more efficient". As all sorts of home and office appliances become interactable through our smartphones, these became essential tools of survival. Planning and organizing became paramount in a world running out of time. The idea of an adult without a smartphone is certainly close to unconceivable in our modern western world (there are always exceptions).

At some point smartphone became mediators of reality, technological enhancers and expanders of all experience. They have clearly extended the scope of our actions and influence. We record, archive and track our experiences, memories and tasks in digital form. We may know at any moment, our heartbeat, temprerature, location, company and nearby outlets, among millions of other parameters. But, while this is definitely impressive to someone that grew up outside this framework, it has become more and more a reason to pause and think this through a few times, maybe a lot.

For now, i think that this simple device impact in our life, is, among other things, reducing us to self-pretending robots. Not in the pure mechanical sense, but on a cultural-psychological level. As we, fragment all aspects of experience into apps, it feels like, we are mostly reducing our behaviour to what the apps can register and whatever the app can't register is dismissed or ignored. In a reverse twist of irony, many are now living and behaving to the beat of some app. "I did 1000 steps", sent 12 emails, researched 4 presentations, brought 5 new customers and got 3 potential investors interested. Our life is looking more and more like an assemblage of appendages measuring and analising our performance in order to find points of optimisation, that will ensure objective relevance and social-economic meaning, like souless machines or selfless robots.

It is no wonder than, that comparing human animals to machines has not fallen into the ridicule that it actually is. Quite the opposite occurred, we often here of "faster than human" machines that can perform immensely "better" than any human or humans combined, without any of the "human-error" risks. We hear of machines that hold all "knowledge of humanity" as some sort of technologic supreme entity that renders puny single humans intelect meaningless. Well, we hear a lot of things nowadays, but it does not mean they make any sense. For me, any comparison between human animals (or any animal for that matter) with machines is the first mistake and entry point to a world of misconceptions and, in my case, for an early nap ;) I also think that these "comparisons" serve mostly a marketing narrative more than an actual scientific one.

Note that, this is not exactly new. If anything, our praise of Reason is clearly the paradoxical culprit. Materialism, it's problem child, is it's most palpable philosophical expression. Measurable reality is the only reality, beyond that, there is only speculation and hence, you are only living if you have a measurable beating heart or fit a neatly organized chart. Your soul? a mere result of electrical neuronal activity and once you are dead, so is the soul. On the other hand, Emotions are objectively the problem. They cloud and influence judgement and impair the proper action of reasonable processes and as such, emotions need to be ignored, dismissed and if possible discarded. By lacking objective ways to measure them, emotions have no role in a functional society. We need to learn to put emotions aside and act reasonably... like robots.

In the end, smartphones and digital interfaces express this obsession with all rational aspects of life. This obsession with optimization, enhancement, improvement of only the aspects that can be expressed and measurable by apps. Everything else is left out and a sort of robautism emerges. Are you there yet?