Top 100 Jaron Lanier Quotes
#1. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.
Jaron Lanier
#2. The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
#3. When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
Jaron Lanier
#4. Information doesn't deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way.
Jaron Lanier
#5. After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
Jaron Lanier
#6. At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.
Jaron Lanier
#7. At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.
Jaron Lanier
#8. Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.
Jaron Lanier
#9. My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
Jaron Lanier
#10. Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they're usually up to something.
Jaron Lanier
#11. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
Jaron Lanier
#12. 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
#13. The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
Jaron Lanier
#14. If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.
Jaron Lanier
#15. If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?
Jaron Lanier
#16. There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
Jaron Lanier
#17. The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
Jaron Lanier
#18. Once a critical mass of conversation is on Facebook, then it's hard to get conversation going elsewhere. What might have started out as a choice is no longer a choice after a network effect causes a phase change.
Jaron Lanier
#19. I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
Jaron Lanier
#20. I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.
Jaron Lanier
#22. Enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
Jaron Lanier
#23. Wouldn't it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?
Jaron Lanier
#24. Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.
Jaron Lanier
#25. If someone reuses your video snippet, and that person's work incorporating yours is reused by yet a third party, you still get a micropayment from that third party.
Jaron Lanier
#26. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.
Jaron Lanier
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. One might ask why big business data is still so often used on faith, even after it has failed spectacularly. The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence.
Jaron Lanier
#30. An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty
Jaron Lanier
#31. 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
#32. Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of "free" information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.
Jaron Lanier
#33. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Jaron Lanier
#34. Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
Jaron Lanier
#35. 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
#36. Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In
Jaron Lanier
#37. A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
#38. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
Jaron Lanier
#39. A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
Jaron Lanier
#40. My choice is to be engaged even if that means I am tainted. I live with contradictions, in accordance with the human condition, but do my best not to forget what absurdities are involved.
Jaron Lanier
#41. Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it's a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful.
Jaron Lanier
#42. Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
Jaron Lanier
#43. 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
#44. I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of emphaty and humanity in that process.
Jaron Lanier
#45. I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect.
Jaron Lanier
#46. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.
Jaron Lanier
#47. If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.
Jaron Lanier
#48. I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.
Jaron Lanier
#49. That you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts.
Jaron Lanier
#50. A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
Jaron Lanier
#51. I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
Jaron Lanier
#52. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Jaron Lanier
#53. Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
Jaron Lanier
#54. The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.
Jaron Lanier
#55. 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
#56. Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.
Jaron Lanier
#57. You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Jaron Lanier
#58. Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.
Jaron Lanier
#59. Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
Jaron Lanier
#60. 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
#61. The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.
Jaron Lanier
#62. Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.
Jaron Lanier
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Jaron Lanier
#67. What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.
Jaron Lanier
#68. If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.
Jaron Lanier
#69. 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
#70. Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.
Jaron Lanier
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
Jaron Lanier
#74. It is exactly when others insist that it's a sign of being free, fresh, and radical to do what everybody's doing that you might want to take notice and think for yourself. Don't be surprised if this is really hard to do.
Jaron Lanier
#75. 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
#76. Right now it might seem draconian to charge for access to information we have come to expect for free, but it would feel very different if you knew what other people were also paying you at the same time for information service you have fractionally contributed to in the course of your life.
Jaron Lanier
#77. The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.
Jaron Lanier
#78. With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else's company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment.
Jaron Lanier
#79. Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
Jaron Lanier
#80. 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
#81. As the familiar quote usually attributed to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis goes, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Jaron Lanier
#82. If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
Jaron Lanier
#83. If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.
Jaron Lanier
#84. In a more incremental world, attributions and rewards will still be contested, no doubt, but particular outcomes will no longer make or break lives.
Jaron Lanier
#85. External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.
Jaron Lanier
#86. The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.
Jaron Lanier
#87. Don't worry: It's not excessively expensive or a threat to the efficiency of the Internet to keep track of where information came from. It will actually make the Internet faster and more efficient.
Jaron Lanier
#88. Not only have consumers prioritized flash and laziness over empowerment, but we have also acquiesced to being spied on all the time.
Jaron Lanier
#89. The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
Jaron Lanier
#90. 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
#91. Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.
Jaron Lanier
#92. People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
Jaron Lanier
#93. 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
#94. Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
Jaron Lanier
#95. Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
Jaron Lanier
#96. When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive.
Jaron Lanier
#97. 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
#98. In order to make tech into something that empowers people, people have to be willing to act as if we can handle being powerful.
Jaron Lanier
#100. People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
Jaron Lanier
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