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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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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
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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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I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.
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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.
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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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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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Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.
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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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Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
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I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
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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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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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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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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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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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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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You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
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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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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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