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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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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
Eventually
Profession
Musician
Canaries
Kill
Professions
Computer
Journalists
Middle
Computers
Class
Musicians
Powerful
Journalist

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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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An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
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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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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
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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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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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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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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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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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After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
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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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I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.
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I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.
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Information is alienated experience.
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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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Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
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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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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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The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem.
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To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.
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