What is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to a shared store of human meaning?

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

If we don't teach kids how to be alone, they will end up only lonely.

Robots want to love us because the field of artificial intelligence has programmed robots to say they want to love us.

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.