Wisdom in fragments

It only survives if people believe it should be there.

Normally what countries like the UK do is try and ignore things and hope they go away. Well, we've been there for 60 years, and we want to go further with it.

If I could capture in my work the difference between talking to a chatbot and what it felt like to open the door and have this woman come in with Mexican food, I would have won my argument.

This is a product. It's being made by companies. It's being sold to me. And it's trying to get me to do certain things, most of all to sit with it and talk to it so they can make more money.

We are so seduced by that pretend empathy that sometimes we start to think that it's empathy enough.

The first rule of social media was: make people angry and silo them with their own kind. There couldn't be a worse training for relationships, or for citizenship, or for democracy.

Learning to deal with friction is a requirement for being a citizen.

There's no intimacy without vulnerability, and there's no relationship without friction, because the whole point of a relationship is that you're not the same as the other person, and you don't have to be.

Therapy is not words being told, people saying words at you that sound like the right words. Therapy is a relationship with someone who cares about you.

Social media came after their attention. This is coming after their attachment.

We are in this spot not just because the chatbots are so attractive, but because we have abandoned each other.

The original sin of artificial intimacy is the use of the first person, because that's the hook. It makes you feel that there's a there there when there's no there there, and there's no one who cares about you.

We're going to have to tackle the problem of existence. That's going to be the main challenge. What do you do when you don't have to do anything?

The more we come to rely on this intelligence, the more important it is that there's a tiny class of people who really understand what the hell is going on.

I always was a software maker before I was a software writer. I love the writing part, but I like the making part more.

We've never had end users able to create or rewrite their operating system at this level, and be at the same level as the operating system designer.