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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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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
Certain
Expression
Cultures
Carnivores
Human
Stage
Enemies
Canine
Humans
Study
Draw
Remarkably
Different
Sort
Teeth
Hunted
Always
Enemy
Pictures
Exaggerated
People
Whether
Draws
Speculation
Culture
Looked
Studies
Experience
Asked
Earlier
Carnivore

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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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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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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
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If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.
Jaron Lanier
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I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.
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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A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
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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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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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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The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share
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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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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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
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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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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
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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Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.
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