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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
Lived
Theory
Inside
Nothing
Life
Stultifying
Confines
Dreary
Gray

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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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After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
Jaron Lanier
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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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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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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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What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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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There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They always had exaggerated canine teeth and a certain sort of expression. That led to speculation about whether at an earlier stage in the human experience we were hunted by some sort of carnivore.
Jaron Lanier
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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.
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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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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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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It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.
Jaron Lanier
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Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.
Jaron Lanier
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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
Jaron Lanier
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In the Sixties, the hippies said Make love, not war, and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say Make music, not war, in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons.
Jaron Lanier