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
A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
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.
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
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.
Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.
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.
The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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.
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.
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.