Quotes from Sherry Turkle

Zane, six, knows that AIBO doesn't have a "real brain and heart," but they are "real enough." AIBO is "kind of alive" because it can function "as if it had a brain and heart.

Despite the seriousness of our moment, I write with optimism. Once aware, we can begin to rethink our practices. When we do, conversation is there to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.

Again, there is psychological risk in the robotic moment. Logan's comment about talking with the AIBO to "get thoughts out" suggests using technology to know oneself better. But it also suggests a fantasy in which we cheapen the notion of companionship to a baseline of "interacting with something." We reduce relationship and come to see this reduction as the norm.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. When we are secure in ourselves we are able to listen to other people and really hear what they have to say. And then in conversation with other people we become better at inner dialogue.

In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions.

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

Online, we easily find "company" but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other's full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in new reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it that the Web "knows" us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially.

Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.

In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as "sort of" alive—a

My mother had a two-part plan: first to end these court-mandated visits.

I glanced toward my mother. She was staring straight ahead. The judge spoke again. Same question: "Do you love your father?

you are always lost when the first recognition is a misrecognition

They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room.

The self does not develop independently from its social surroundings.

the transformative power of intelligence, self-reliance, and words.

For one woman, a college sophomore, "It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person." For a senior man, "If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

It was a very particular loneliness: knowing that people around you were also sad but that you couldn't be sad together.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

But in creative conversations, in conversations in which people get to really know each other, you usually have to tolerate a bit of boredom.

And in our families, we can create sacred spaces—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the car—that are device-free.

We work so hard to build our online connections. We have so much faith in them. But we must take care that in the end we do not simply feel alone with our devices.