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Jaron Lanier Quotes (1960-)
Writer, Musician, Scientist
About Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier (born 3 May 1960) is an American computer scientist, musician, and writer on technology and society. He is considered one of the pioneers of virtual reality.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Jaron Lanier quotes.
“Digital information is really just people in disguise.”
“People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.”
“The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.”
“There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.”
“Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.”
“There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.”
“I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.”
“The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality.”
“If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.”
“The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile.”
“We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. 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.”
Jaron Lanier Quotes by Topic
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Jaron Lanier on Empathy 3 quotes
“Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?””
Jaron Lanier on Complexity
“I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.”
Jaron Lanier on Adoration
“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 on The Machine Stops
“[The] very first description of the internet in any detail was probably E M Forster's The Machine Stops from 1909, decades before computers existed: "People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine." It might still be the most accurate description. How Forster did it remains a mystery.”
What Jaron Lanier Said About Others
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Jaron Lanier on Daniel Dennett
“Only a zombie like Dennett could write a book called "Consciousness Explained" that doesn't address consciousness at all. Only zombies could respond with a book called "Dennett and His Critics" which doesn't criticize Dennett at all.”
About Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier (born 3 May 1960) is an American computer scientist, musician, and writer on technology and society. He is considered one of the pioneers of virtual reality.