Jaron Lanier Quotes

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Jaron Lanier

Profession : Artist

Birth : May 3, 1960

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

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

Jaron Lanier

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

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.

Jaron Lanier

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

Jaron Lanier

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

Jaron Lanier

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

My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.

Jaron Lanier

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Jaron Lanier

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

Jaron Lanier

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

Jaron Lanier

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

Jaron Lanier

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

Jaron Lanier

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

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