Instead of asking, "are robots becoming more human?" we need to ask "are humans becoming more robotic?"

For more than 65 years, computer scientists have studied whether robots' behavior could become indistinguishable from human intelligence. But while we've focused on machines, have we ignored changes to our own capabilities? In a book due to be published next year, Being Human in the 21st Century, a law professor and a philosopher argue that we've overlooked the equally important, inverse question: Are humans becoming more like robots? In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing put forward what's now known as the "Turing Test." Essentially, Turing proposed that a key test of machine thinking is whether someone asking the same questions to both a human and a robot could tell which is which. This has since become an important method to evaluate artificial intelligence, with regular Turing Test competitions to determine the extent of robots' growing ability to mimic human behavior.