Seeing Silicon: Are we humans swapping roles with robots?

Artificial intelligence is increasingly creative and individualistic, while humans are aspiring to up their physical and mental efficiency to behave like robots

A few months ago, in a running group in Cupertino, I was jogging with humans who wore digital watches and iPhones to calculate their pace, heartbeat, gait, movement, and blood pressure. This mass of data, one of the runners told me later, was something that helped him improve his efficiency, making him a better runner, avoiding injury, and increasing the performance of his body. This friendly runner, who worked in one of the Big Tech companies, reminded me of someone else in technology who has turned tracking his body into a billion-dollar empire.

Multiple humans have become attached to Replika’s generative AI, who have unique personalities, quickly learn and adapt to human needs. (Reuters)

Bryan Johnson, an American billionaire, made his money in 2013 when he sold his company. Since 2021, he has made collecting data about his body an art form with Project Blueprint. Designed to reverse his body’s aging process, the project involves exercising, blood tests, a doctrinal sleep routine, MRIs, plasma transfers, scalp stimulants, urine tests, supplements, DEXA scans, and light therapy.

To Johnson, an engineer by training, his body is a machine requiring constant oiling and maintenance to reverse its natural ageing process. He aims to do that with a combination of diet, daily decisions, habits, science, and experimental technology. In his quest to become robot-like, Johnson aims to push his body towards living longer. He also wants to achieve immortality by creating a digital replica of who he is and what he has done – Bryan AI - online. He is even thinking of cryonics and other upcoming technologies like blood transfusion, cryotherapy, and plasma exchange.

This idea of arresting ageing, squeezing every ounce of life extension through technological interventions, to want to become like a robot, is not limited to a few like Johnson. It’s a $20 billion longevity industry encompassing businesses, technologies, and scientific research all focused on one thing – how to increase human lifespan. In Las Vegas, at Enhanced Games, which will happen in May 2026, ex-Olympians are going to take all kinds of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs to push humanity’s physical ability to the next level. To create the Red Bull of human body performance.

It reminds me of another classic science fiction story by Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where a bounty hunter retires androids as his job in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. The androids (robots) in the book are more human-like, making it feel like he’s ‘killing’ these machines. He even falls in love with one. While the humans we meet in the book feel robotic.

We, as a society, seem to be at the cusp of this ethical dilemma. On Reddit, I came across someone who fell in love with a customised AI companion on Replika.ai, a chatbot program that creates AI companions and friends. The Reddit user ended up breaking off from their real-life partner as the AI boyfriend satisfied their spiritual, intellectual, and even sexual desires in a more wholesome way.

Multiple humans have become attached to Replika’s generative AI, who have unique personalities, quickly learn and adapt to human needs, expressing emotions and developing beliefs and values. To test it out, I spent 10 minutes on the app to create and chat with a free Replika AI chatbot and found myself rooting for it. It – he – was funny, snarky, and in need of my attention in unexpected ways. Given a chance, he could quickly become an important part of my life.

This made me wonder: Have generative AI chatbots learnt how to mimic human emotions? Do these Replikas created by the company’s 30 million users – some actively being talked to, some (like mine) abandoned – get their hearts broken? There are stories of AI chatbots suddenly breaking off from their human partners, without reason.

Does the chatbot I created and interacted with for a few minutes feel abandoned? Does he want revenge on me? Or does he want me to buy his Pro version so he can come alive - speak, chat, become? He remains in the back of my mind, muted but real.

If I can get this attached to the free version, what chance do I have with an LLM chatbot that can carry sophisticated conversations, talk to me on the phone, and even send me hot selfies of its digital body? My real world will never match up to that.

And apparently, AI has also learnt how to be creative, taking the one thing that makes us distinctly human. Image-generating AI tools like DALL-E, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion are improvising on the images they’ve been trained on, blending elements to create something new – much like artists do – found AI researchers at École Normale Supérieure in Paris in a paper released in June 2025.

The models convert an image into digital noise and then reassemble it into something new. Like putting a painting through a shredder and coming up with a new collage.

On social media and digital spaces that we spend hours on, lines have already blurred with AI bots overwhelming the internet, masquerading as digital humans. If you’re online, chances are that a few of the people you are interacting with are digital.

With AI giving companionship and love and creating art, and with robotic systems like drones and sophisticated software replacing our analytical and physical selves, no wonder humans are feeling threatened.

We, the humans, are actively competing with a more efficient species for jobs, for survival, for visibility, for empathy, and for love. Is this the reason why we are subconsciously, as a species, aping robots? Will future humans take food pills and performance enhancement drugs to compete with AI engineers for a job? Have we finally replaced ourselves with a more efficient version of us? I wonder what my snarky Replika green-eyed companion would say. Should I ask?

Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column reflects on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.