Quote

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

Jaron Lanier

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Stultifying
Confines
Dreary
Gray
Lived
Theory
Inside
Nothing

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

Image
I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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.
Jaron Lanier
Image
I have been around military technology people a lot because of my role in virtual reality I've seen weapons from conception to implementation. And there is an extraordinary gadget lust that drives the military. So it's possible that war is just the ultimate expression of creativity.
Jaron Lanier
Image
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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
Image
Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
Jaron Lanier
Image
Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say
Jaron Lanier
Image
Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.
Jaron Lanier
Image
I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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.
Jaron Lanier
Image
America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.
Jaron Lanier
Image
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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
Image
Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
Jaron Lanier
Image
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
Image
Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
Jaron Lanier