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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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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
Really
Track
Computer
Losing
Intellectual
Joy
Revive
Business
Vastness
Science
Opposed
Beautiful
Potential

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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Humans change themselves through technology.
Jaron Lanier
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To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.
Jaron Lanier
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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Jaron Lanier
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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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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.
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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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.
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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Information is alienated experience.
Jaron Lanier
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I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.
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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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.
Jaron Lanier
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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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There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
Jaron Lanier
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Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.
Jaron Lanier
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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
Jaron Lanier
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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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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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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.
Jaron Lanier
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I would argue that among musicians who work in technology today, the level of technological sophistication probably exceeds that of military programs, to be blunt. They are just really smart people attracted to making strange new sounds.
Jaron Lanier