Brad Dunn

“These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. This can happen when one is finding one’s way through a blizzard of text messages; it can happen when interacting with a robot. I feel witness for a third time to a turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves. We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Psychological studies show that specific gaming designs such as badges, leaderboards and performance graphs can be powerful tools to maximise customer participation and brand loyalty.”
― Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

“Universal computers are capable of performing all the computations permitted by the laws of physics. Once a universal computer is constructed, all you have to do is to load it with the right programme, and it can simulate any other system that is physically allowed. This includes the biosphere, with all its splendid richness of animals, plants, and microorganisms; and, in principle, it even includes your brain, together with thoughts and emotions.”
― Chiara Marletto, The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals

“if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains