Humanity vs the robots

No, I'm not speaking of some cheesy sci-fi B movie. I'm speaking of what it means to be human.
Normally I wax Theologic, but today I fear my tone will be more philosophical than anything else.
What does it mean to be human? Are we, as Aquinas defines us, the "rational animal?" Are we simply the most intellectually developed biological system? Are we evolution's greatest accomplishment?
We erect monuments and towers. We write books. We have history. All of these things I have noted before. And as I have noted, this denotes that there is more to us than the systems of organs and bones.
Psychology, which many accept as a branch of Philosophy, has long tried to unlock the real mystery behind that one organ which denotes us as superior to our animal cousins, the brain. While there are several schools of psychology, some of which are highly controversial and others which are more concretely scientific, there are a few which strike me for their approach to the human mind.
Gestalt theory, which comes from the German word for "whole" believes that 1+1 does not equal 2 but equals 3. There's a heavy emphasis that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, the human mind is so much more than neurons firing impulses and neurotransmitters relaying signals. Their approach is to examine the person as a whole and prescribe treatment that emphasizes a holistic approach. A human then, is not simply a rung on the ladder of evolution nor is it a mass of biological material. A human is a human, and the definition of that is more than one can easily grasp.
Then comes my personal favorite psychological school. The humanists. Carl Rogers is often cited as the founder of this particular school. His theory of human sanity and the human mind was a system of needs. He believed that we must fulfill a certain set of needs, such as basic survival needs, before we can move on to more advanced needs, such as emotional needs. Eventually, when we have fulfilled all of our needs, we will find ourselves self-actualized. His list of self-actualized people reads like a list of "Who's Who in Philanthropy." To Rogers, self-actualization was the pinnacle of what it means to be human.
I take a lot of stock in the Rogerian system. However, it must be noted that many of the people on his list, such as Mother Teresa, were on that list despite not fulfilling some of their more "primitive" needs.
So it is that I have come to understand humanity as taking a two-course route through life. There are those who, as Rogers suggested, go through life seeking to fulfill some basic needs. These people often get caught up in some basic desire. They seek money, a survival asset at minimum. But they do it to excess. They become misers. There are also those who seek love too greatly. And rather than finding love they find cheap company and no sense of security. There are those who seek seek recognition and spend their lives working for the approval of others.
Most all of us are guilty of these things in some way or another. We all want to be able to feel like our needs are fulfilled. We do not want to feel as if we're lacking something. Worse yet, we don't want to feel deprived of something we need.
Then there are those who go straight for self-actualization. Some of these people are self-sacrificing. Others are simply philanthropists. Their needs are not as important for them to fulfill. They seek, rather, to fulfill the needs of others. These people are the ones who truly make the world go round. Their love and generosity are the warm fires by which all of humanity either stands or perishes in the cold.
Thus we come to another topic. The idea of human happiness and how it relates to the human person. Humans, at worst, are emotional, reckless, feckless, beasts which have the added disadvantage of questioning their purpose in the universe. It can be truly easy to be lost in the sea of humanity, wondering how to find happiness or to fulfill our destinies.
Those who genuinely seek to be happy and make others happy, seem to me to be true humans. They seek to fulfill their telos as humans. They seek to rise above the mechanical, simple biological functions passed on by millions of years of evolutionary instinct. They love more deeply, and they live more fully. These are the fortunate few who love life with a fulness that others who seek simply to survive lack.
Then there are the robots. These are the people simply trying to fulfill a basic need. Their evolutionary programming dictates what they do with their lives. They live by the pleasure principle. These people are like machines that have a basic programming that they seek neither to exceed nor to leave unaccomplished. They store money like squirrels for the winter. They mate like rabbits in the Spring. They preen and pout like peacoks in mating season.
How then are we different from the rest of the animal kingdom if we do not at least look at our direction? Socrates stated that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Have we examined our lives? Are we striving to fulfill biologic instincts or are we rising to our place among the heavens? Have we simply made our lives more convenient or have we truly contributed to this world?