Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanieris an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. From 2006 he began to work at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth3 May 1960
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
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.
Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
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.
People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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.
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.