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
real nerd culture
The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.
real ambition thinking
Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.
silly technology reality
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.
real littles painting
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.
beautiful creativity reality
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.
reality nervous nervous-system
External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.
technology data realization
There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.
real unexpected weirdness
A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
dad felt grew house lacking parallel sort sufficient willing
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.
along clear criticized ethical improves itself provide since technology tools unless
Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.
although exactly facing
Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.
adventures approach computer felt heroic highest information leads science
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.
html kids mass shocking unix
The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
came copied enter information knows nobody
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.