Telephone companies sell us voice plans because they know we're not going to use them. We're hiding from each other. People say that calls aren't efficient, but trying to bring efficiency into your intimacy can get you into a lot of trouble.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.

We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins.

We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.

These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.