We... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.

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.

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

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