Perhaps because I was traveling, my blogging this week focused mostly on things relating to the body. I started the week with a short essay about the struggle so many of us have navigating the two worlds that now compete for our time: the physical world and the virtual world; I call this the amphibious life. Then on Tuesday, I looked at the struggle that many businesses today have maintaining a “corporate culture” with so much of the workforce working from the road, or from their homes. On Wednesday I ranted about one of the first public safety crises resulting from our amphibious lives: distracted driving. And on Thursday, I rhapsodized about the pleasures of disconnecting from the network and allowing oneself to enjoy pure moments of non-digital infotainment (like reading stuff in print). For many people, the disconnecting was forced upon them this week: Facebook and Twitter experienced a series of intense denial-of-service attacks, forcing millions of people to evaluate their options for digital communication and infotainment. Their stories are covered here.

In short, I was largely, perhaps unconsciously, focused on our physical limits, all the while noting — in a series of daily posts I am calling AIDigest — the myriad innovations from the world of AI and robotics that are getting coverage in the mainstream press: robots that cook, robots that run, robots that play music, robots that help us cope with illness, robots that have value to humans simply because they are beautiful (robots as art). As Time Magazine reported, a lot of these innovations are coming out of Japan. Why? As Time’s Lisa Thomas notes, it may be as simple as the fact that Japan is facing a long-term decline in population, making the inevitable ascent of robot life perhaps a necessity not just an odd cultural/intellectual/technological fetish. The country is running out of bodies.

I can’t help but feel like what I experienced this week — my second week writing this blog — might have been a microcosm of two larger-but-related trends: man reaching its limits, machines being deployed to do more. But a more likely explanation is that I have carefully chosen to focus on fresh information that conveniently fits my new focus of interest. But even if that were true, I believe that the mounting evidence that people are pushing themselves to their physical, intellectual and emotional limits (did I mention all the new drugs we are taking?) compels us to look closely at the narrowing interface between man and machine. That’s a big focus for this blog, and in my travels this week I realized just how important it has become. The machine is becoming more like man — everyone gets that. But the surprise for so many of us at the beginning of this century is how man is becoming more like machine. As I suggested in my Thursday rant about the pleasures of disconnecting, it’s important to distinguish between the two phenomena. For as long as we are more like man and less like machine, we will need to take better care of the body that houses us. And for now, that body does have limits.