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Technology Quotes by Jaron Lanier

49 Technology quotes by Jaron Lanier

All Technology quotes Jaron Lanier’s page

Jaron Lanier cautions that our love of gadgets can pull us away from real human contact. He points out that tools alone don’t improve lives; they need the soul behind them. He also worries that designing programs that act like people may erode empathy and make us feel less human.

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The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

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Humans change themselves through technology.

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A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

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People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

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“we have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”

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Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have…

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It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

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Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

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There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and…

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I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.

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It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

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What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

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I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures…

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When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person,…

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We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries…

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Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves…

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Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about…

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The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic,” the New York Times tech columnist once wrote.…

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“The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told…

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I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done…

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“Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said…

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Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum…

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“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than…

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Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing…

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In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can…

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Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended…

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Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people…

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“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested.…

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“This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the…

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“Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by…

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“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your…

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“A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are…

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“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by…

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“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and…

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“Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience… If…

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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

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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…

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I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of…

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More by Jaron Lanier

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…

Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a…

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come…

We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance,…

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

“There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human…

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The…

There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They…

“Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience… If there are…

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…

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give…

The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web,…

Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.