Jaron Lanier Quotes - Page 5

I'm an advocate of human nature.

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

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.

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.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

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.

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

After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

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

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.

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.

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.

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

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.

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

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.

One thing that I have been trying to do is bring together in places like Bosnia technologists who create ever-more destructive land mines [and convince them not to build more dangerous mines]. And that has actually worked.

If war stems from unmet needs related to male adolescent ritual, that's something that we need to examine. I'm interested in the possibility of simply getting rid of war. I'd be no more willing to let go of that than to let go of the possibility of eradicating cancer. That's not to say I'm certain we can, but I am willing to use any energy at all in the quest.

Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.

I have been around military technology people a lot because of my role in virtual reality I've seen weapons from conception to implementation. And there is an extraordinary gadget lust that drives the military. So it's possible that war is just the ultimate expression of creativity.