Jaron Lanier Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

  Jaron Lanier

  Perfection, Demand, Statistics

  "The New Humanists: Science at the Edge". Book edited by John Brockman, 2003.

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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

  Technology, Thinking, New Experiences

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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

  People, Progress, Way

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• 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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• There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

  Jaron Lanier

  Theory, Gray, Dreary

  "The New Humanists: Science at the Edge". Book edited by John Brockman, 2003.

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• I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

  Jaron Lanier

  Mean, Information, Advertising

  "Should Facebook's Users Share Its Riches?". "All Things Considered" with Melissa Block, www.npr.org. February 15, 2012.

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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

  Expression, People, Enemy

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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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

  Struggle, Danger, Made

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.22, Vintage

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• Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

  Jaron Lanier

  Technology, People, Expectations

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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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

  Mistake, Thinking, Ideas

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• One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.

  Jaron Lanier

  Tests, Earning, Insult

  Jaron Lanier (2013). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.365, Simon and Schuster

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• A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

  Jaron Lanier

  Accomplishment, Culture, Valleys

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• Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.

  Jaron Lanier

  Perception, Suffering, Sake

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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

  People, Identity, Pseudonyms

  "My bright idea: Jaron Lanier". Interview with Aleks Krotoski, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

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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

  Beautiful, Track, Joy

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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

  War, Opportunity, Missing

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.

  Jaron Lanier

  Real, Ambition, Thinking

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.28, Vintage

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• At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.

  Jaron Lanier

  Self, People, Giving

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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

  Giving, Advice, Progress

  "My bright idea: Jaron Lanier". Interview with Aleks Krotoski, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

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• It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

  Jaron Lanier

  Feet, Tree, Towns

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• Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

  Jaron Lanier

  Government, People, Progress

  On "Digital Power And Its Discontents", www.edge.org.

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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.

  Jaron Lanier

  Responsibility, Simple, Html

  "Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel - interview". Interview with John Naughton, www.theguardian.com. March 16, 2013.

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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

  Thinking, Ideas, Profound

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• The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.

  Jaron Lanier

  Crush, Spiritual, Thinking

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• Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

  Jaron Lanier

  Photography, Jobs, Class

  "Who Owns the Future?". Book by Jaron Lanier, 2013.

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