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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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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
Time
Fact
People
Facts
Virtual
Reality
Warfare
Problem
Fascinating
Reason
Developing
Come
Harder
Take
Interested
Things
Problems

More quotes by 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'm an advocate of human nature.
Jaron Lanier
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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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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.
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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
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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
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Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
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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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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Jaron Lanier
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Information is alienated experience.
Jaron Lanier
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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
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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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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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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
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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
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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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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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