Jaron Lanier

friendship weirdness

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”

― Jaron Lanier

Turing test machine smart lower standards illusion

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?"

― Jaron Lanier

funding civilization advertising nutrition tube anus mouth

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.”

― Jaron Lanier

important technology change people

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

― Jaron Lanier

crowd individual mob behavior

“Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.”

― Jaron Lanier

low standard information technology IT look good

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

― Jaron Lanier

object human computer musical instrument

"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

IT information technology social engineering

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

― Jaron Lanier

economy advertiser thrive journalist struggle deception truth

"An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty"

― Jaron Lanier

mobs dictators

"Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish."

― Jaron Lanier

wisdom crowd ox average design committee crap think share

"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."

― Jaron Lanier

writing thinking economical sustainable

"Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable."

― Jaron Lanier

machine autonomy human responsibility

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."

― Jaron Lanier

HTML one-way link people responsibility

"The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem."

― Jaron Lanier

evolution speed slow

"Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow."

― Jaron Lanier

money fail frequently software medicine

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

― Jaron Lanier

missionary reductionism web 2.0 technologist church state

“Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.”

― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

marketplace diverse open society online data cryptostigmergy

"A coherent marketplace is a true market economy coupled with a diverse, open society online. People will be paid for their data and will pay for services that require data from others. Individuals’ attention will be guided by their self-defined interests rather than by manipulative platforms beholden to advertisers or other third parties."

― Jaron Lanier

tech giant government Facebook Google free speech democracy

"Tech giants have become so influential that they function like transnational governments charting the future to a greater degree than any national government. Facebook and Google, for example, have effectively become central mediators unilaterally determining the balance between free speech and election manipulation for all major developed democracies."

― Jaron Lanier

system optimize influence privacy elections social strife

"A system optimized for influencing unwitting people has flooded the digital world with perverse incentives that lead to violations of privacy, manipulated elections, personal anxiety, and social strife."

― Jaron Lanier

internet giant society manipulation discourse

"Today, internet giants finance contact between people by charging third parties who wish to influence those who are connecting. The result is an internet — and, indeed, a society —built on injected manipulation instead of consensual discourse."

― Jaron Lanier