If for most ancient idolaters it was the human form with its physical qualities that represented their highest conception of themselves, for us as moderns it is the human mind, a calculating rationality or unconstrained will, disembodied and stripped of embodied particularity. Pursuing this ideal, we constructed computers in this image—an image of ourselves as we hoped to be. Whereas ancient idols had mouths but did not speak, Siri speaks but with no mouth, and listens without ears. Having made such images and given ourselves over to them, we have increasingly become like them.

Have you ever stopped, in the middle of checking your notifications for the umpteenth time after some post you thought particularly witty or important, to reflect on how pathetic you must look: measuring your social significance by means of a number next to a heart icon? “137 likes…ooh…138—I’m really somethin’ today.”

Human beings crave social affirmation. There’s nothing wrong with that, on one level; that’s how God made us: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Like all natural desires, it was transformed into an unquenchable thirst by the disordering effects of the Fall, so that we engage in pathological attention-seeking behaviors, from the 3-year-old’s tantrum to the teenage boy’s death-defying-dare to the conquering general’s blood-soaked quest for glory. But buried beneath the often foolish and overwrought expressions of this desires lies a wholesome and very human urge to know oneself as one is known, to be seen and recognized and loved by one’s fellow man—and hopefully to see and recognize and love in return.

But in the digital age, something strange has happened to this fundamental human urge: it has become dehumanized. For human beings, the various means by which we give and receive social affirmation are manifold; indeed, no two are quite alike. I feel a warm glow when I receive tokens of my wife’s love, my children’s affection, my parents’ esteem, my coworkers’ respect, my customers’ satisfaction, etc. But these experiences are not quite reducible to one another, and indeed, we recognize it as a pathology in ourselves when, starved of recognition in one sphere of relationships, we try, leech-like, to suck such recognition out of another relationship—such as when a man thwarted in his workplace demands that his wife make up the difference. But digital technology encourages us—nay, positively programs us—to reduce each of these experiences into one quantifiable interchangeable measure of admiration: a number (or to be precise, two numbers: likes/reactions and reposts/shares). We have traded the infinite shades of qualitative difference between a child’s hug and a colleague’s pat on the back for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, yes or no, one or zero. We have, in short, computerized ourselves.

As I’ve been reading and reflecting on digital technology over the past few months, a consistent theme has been the ways in which the digital is digitizing us—that is, how our technologies are changing our sense of what it means to be human and remaking us in their image. In debates over artificial intelligence, the question everyone wants an answer to is, “So can we actually create an artificial intelligence that matches human intelligence?” Well, no, we can’t, because human intelligence is always embodied (not to mention ensouled), and thus qualitatively different. There are always two ways of meeting a benchmark, though: you can raise your performance till you clear the benchmark, or you can lower the bar. If we can’t make computers human, we can at least make humans computer-like.

This is a constant theme of Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: even as we make virtual reality ever more realistic, the virtual does not lose its distinction from the real: we know that “Facebook friends” is not the same as “IRL [in real life] friends,” that cybersex isn’t real sex.

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