"Cybercaster Ananova’s first words, on April 19, were interesting enough: “Hello, world. Here is the news — and this time it’s personal.”"

"I found that I didn’t object to the idea of you, [Ananova], — the idea of a computer reading me the news — probably in the same way that people did not object a generation ago to Reuters' bringing them stock quotes on a special desktop machine. That machine was clunky, too. But it got better. Much better. And so, I believe, will you."

The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

John M. Lawler Metaphors We Compute By
"I'm going to talk today about metaphors. Everybody here has heard and used the word metaphor plenty in the course of your educational experience (and the amount of educational experience in this room is pretty staggering, so that makes lots of uses of the word). To quote a famous sage, "It's a common word, something you use everyday." It generally gets stored in memory with all the other stuff you learn in literature classes, like simile, plot, characters, rhyme, meter, and so on. And then it gets forgotten, or at least not looked at often, until and unless you do something literary. I'm here today to suggest that in fact there is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than all this would imply."