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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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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
Dreary
Gray
Lived
Theory
Inside
Nothing
Life
Stultifying
Confines

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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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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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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When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.
Jaron Lanier
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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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We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.
Jaron Lanier
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Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.
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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Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
Jaron Lanier
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I'm an advocate of human nature.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
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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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Jaron Lanier
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Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living. We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.
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
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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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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
Jaron Lanier