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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.

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
Rooms
Connections
Detail
Show
Avoid
Twitter
Lives
Anxiety
Services
Assuaged
Shows
Door
Isolated
Announce
Young
Constant
Closed
Bedtime
Every
Empty
Separation
Vacuums
Mind
Doors
Connection
Vacuum
Like
Room
Details
Screaming

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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.
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Eliminating wickedness is a different project from eliminating violence. Eliminating violence - the destruction associated with wickedness - is a practical program that I'm very willing to pursue.
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There's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.
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Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
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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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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.
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The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.
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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
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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.
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Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
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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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Information is alienated experience.
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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 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
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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.
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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
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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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The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.
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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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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
Jaron Lanier