Quotes from Sherry Turkle

The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, "the anxiety of always.

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.

There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of "as if " performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.

For three decades, in describing people's relationships with computers, I have often used the metaphor of the Rorschach, the inkblot test that psychologists use as a screen onto which people can project their feelings and styles of thought. But as children interact with sociable robots like Furbies, they move beyond a psychology of projection to a new psychology of engagement. They try to deal with the robot as they would deal with a pet or a person.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude; the ability to be separate; to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.

This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness.

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things. I

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers insight into the origins of this guilt. Damasio describes two levels of experiencing pain. The first is a physical response to a painful stimulus. The second, a far more complex reaction, is an emotion associated with pain. This is an internal representation of the physical.

Professional life requires that one live with the tension of using technology and remembering to distrust it.

Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly.

Artificial intelligence is often described as the art and science of "getting machines to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people." We are coming to a parallel definition of artificial emotion as the art of "getting machines to express things that would be considered feelings if expressed by people.

You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations.

From watching children play with objects designed as "amusements," we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us.

These days, our technology treats us as though we were objects and we get in the habit of objectifying one another as bits of data, profiles viewed. But only shared vulnerability and human empathy allow us to truly understand one another.

Thinking of mind as program trained you to think in absolutes

But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. THE

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely

During cocktails, Octavio Paz walked up to me with a champagne glass in hand and said, "Vous avez les seins très beaux

I'm always one sentence away from bringing up democracy, religious freedom, the rights of minorities, all of these in danger.