Jaron Lanier Quotes About Computers

Quotes about: Computers

• 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

  Musical, Mind, Body

  "The virtual visionary" by Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. December 29, 2001.

• 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

  Children, Kids, Technology

• A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

  Jaron Lanier

  Thinking, Yield, Circles

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.49, Vintage

• 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

  Powerful, Class, Musician

• 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

  Beautiful, Track, Joy

• 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

  Technology, Design, Brain

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.4, Vintage

• The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

  Jaron Lanier

  Intelligent, Order, People

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.36, Vintage

• Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our command.

  Jaron Lanier

  Vision, Might, Way

  "One-Half of a Manifesto". www.wired.com. December 01, 2000.

• 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

  Mistake, Thinking, Ideas

• We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

  Jaron Lanier

  Beautiful, Creativity, Reality

• We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.

  Jaron Lanier

  Kids, Thinking, Computer

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