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To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.

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
Evil
War
Nothing

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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
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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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I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
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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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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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