Jaron Lanier Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. 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
A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.

Jaron Lanier
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

Jaron Lanier
People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.

Jaron Lanier
The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much.

Jaron Lanier
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
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Jaron Lanier
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
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

Jaron Lanier
I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.

Jaron Lanier
Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.

Jaron Lanier
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

Jaron Lanier
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
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
The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

Jaron Lanier
As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.

Jaron Lanier
There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.

Jaron Lanier
The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

Jaron Lanier
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

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

Jaron Lanier
There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.

Jaron Lanier
Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the
internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs.
For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.

Jaron Lanier
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
The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality.

Jaron Lanier
Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.

Jaron Lanier
A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

Jaron Lanier
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
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
The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

Jaron Lanier
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

Jaron Lanier