Jaron Lanier Quotes
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A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.
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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.
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I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
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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.
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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.
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We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
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It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
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Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
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Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
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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.
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Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.
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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.
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Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.
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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.
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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
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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.
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I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
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The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.
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When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.
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I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.