Jaron Lanier Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic,†the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. “Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s ***** to one’s mouth.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.”
-- Jaron Lanier -
“We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.”
-- Jaron Lanier
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