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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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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
Human
Rhetoric
Humans
Cheerful
Think
Consistently
Thinking
Express
Profound
Future
Nature
Ideas
Pessimism
More quotes by Jaron Lanier
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
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
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
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
Information is alienated experience.
Jaron Lanier
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
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
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
We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.
Jaron Lanier
In fact, one reason I am interested in developing things in virtual reality is that they're so fascinating. I can come up with problems that are harder than warfare to take up people's time.
Jaron Lanier
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
A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
Jaron Lanier
If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?
Jaron Lanier
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
There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.
Jaron Lanier
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
People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
Jaron Lanier
An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
Jaron Lanier
People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Jaron Lanier
A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
Jaron Lanier