We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.

Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our command.

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.

The most effective young Facebook users, however -- the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults -- are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.