Jaron Lanier quotes

Jaron Lanier is an American computer scientist, composer, and author recognized as a pioneer in virtual reality. His work explores the intersection of technology, society, and human consciousness. He advocates for ethical technology development and is a prominent critic of the effects of social media. Here are 58 of his quotes:

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. (Jaron Lanier)
There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics. View quote
Jaron Lanier
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory. View quote
Jaron Lanier
The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow. View quote
Jaron Lanier
I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive. (Jaron Lanier)
There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better. View quote
Jaron Lanier
People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Digital information is really just people in disguise. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much. View quote
Jaron Lanier
It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish. (Jaron Lanier)
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier
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. View quote
Jaron Lanier