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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
Nothing
Evil
War

More quotes by Jaron Lanier

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I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.
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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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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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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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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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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
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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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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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You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
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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I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
Jaron Lanier
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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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Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.
Jaron Lanier
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There's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.
Jaron Lanier
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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
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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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Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
Jaron Lanier
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If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
Jaron Lanier
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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier