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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

Jaron Lanier

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Jaron Lanier
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: May 3
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Businessperson
Composer
Computer Scientist
Essayist
Programmer
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
People
Oppress
Governments
Avoid
Progress
Government
Need
Needs
Make
Mobs

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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I would argue that among musicians who work in technology today, the level of technological sophistication probably exceeds that of military programs, to be blunt. They are just really smart people attracted to making strange new sounds.
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I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.
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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
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A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
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There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
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Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
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If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.
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Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
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People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
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Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
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A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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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.
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After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
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We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
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Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
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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.
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Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say
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People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
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Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.
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