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I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.

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
Wrong
Certain
Right
Way
Things
Occasionally
Delightful

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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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.
Jaron Lanier
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I'm an advocate of human nature.
Jaron Lanier
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I have been around military technology people a lot because of my role in virtual reality I've seen weapons from conception to implementation. And there is an extraordinary gadget lust that drives the military. So it's possible that war is just the ultimate expression of creativity.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
Jaron Lanier
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There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
Jaron Lanier
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Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.
Jaron Lanier
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Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.
Jaron Lanier
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Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.
Jaron Lanier
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Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.
Jaron Lanier
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In the Sixties, the hippies said Make love, not war, and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say Make music, not war, in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons.
Jaron Lanier
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We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.
Jaron Lanier
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If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.
Jaron Lanier
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When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.
Jaron Lanier
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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Jaron Lanier
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A file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. It's shrinking the overall economy. I think it's the mistake of our age.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They always had exaggerated canine teeth and a certain sort of expression. That led to speculation about whether at an earlier stage in the human experience we were hunted by some sort of carnivore.
Jaron Lanier