Today I've been flicking through John Wood's 'The Virtual Embodied' thinking about embodied presence. Some useful stuff for my write-up.

I've also been reading 'I, Robot', a series of short stories by Isaac Asimov, following on from the paper I read a few days ago on the social nature of human interactions with computers. The stories look at machines with various levels of intelligence and emotional understanding.

I thought a quote from 'Robbie', the first story in the book, was interesting, both in considering a cyborg future and in the context of young people's current use of computer games and social networking. Here a young child has a robotic nanny, which the mother dislikes. The quote is something she says to her husband, who completely trusts the robot.

'I won't have my daughter entrusted to a machine - and I don't care how clever it is. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking'.

The bit about the soul is pretty relevant to my project, as it is this kind of intangible quality - the imagination - that I am looking at.