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If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

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
Somehow
Congratulatory
Allow
Distract
Technology
Adoration
Lost
Agenda
Self
Agendas
Originals
Original
Contact

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Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
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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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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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There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
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If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.
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Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.
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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.
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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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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
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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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It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.
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The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share
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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
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I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
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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.
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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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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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If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?
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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.
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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.
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