List of Jaron Lanier Quotes

I Have Been Around Military Technology People A Lot Because Of My Role In Virtual Reality I've Seen Weapons From Conception To Implementation. And There Is An Extraordinary Gadget Lust That Drives The Military. So It's Possible That War Is Just The Ultimate Expression Of Creativity.

One Thing That I Have Been Trying To Do Is Bring Together In Places Like Bosnia Technologists Who Create Ever-more Destructive Land Mines [and Convince Them Not To Build More Dangerous Mines]. And That Has Actually Worked.

Chemotherapy Is A Good Thing Even Though It Kills Healthy Cells. But We Still Hope For Something Better. We'd Like To Prevent Cancer In The First Place.

In The Sixties, The Hippies Said "make Love, Not War," And That Was Naive. But It Might Be Less Naive To Say "make Music, Not War," In The Sense That The People Who Create Musical Instruments Are The Same People Who Make Up New Weapons.

If War Stems From Unmet Needs Related To Male Adolescent Ritual, That's Something That We Need To Examine. I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Simply Getting Rid Of War. I'd Be No More Willing To Let Go Of That Than To Let Go Of The Possibility Of Eradicating Cancer. That's Not To Say I'm Certain We Can, But I Am Willing To Use Any Energy At All In The Quest.

Advertisers Are Not Thinking Radically Enough - They Look For Technology To Lead Instead Of Trying The Neuroscience Approach And Thinking About What Parts Of The Brain Haven't Been Activated Before. These New Experiences Bring New Capabilities To The Brain.

Software Breaks Before It Bends, So It Demands Perfection In A Universe That Prefers Statistics.

Criticism Is Always Easier Than Constructive Solutions.

When Developers Of Digital Technologies Design A Program That Requires You To Interact With A Computer As If It Were A Person, They Ask You To Accept In Some Corner Of Your Brain That You Might Also Be Conceived Of As A Program.

I'm Hoping The Reader Can See That Artificial Intelligence Is Better Understood As A Belief System Instead Of A Technology.

The Attribution Of Intelligence To Machines, Crowds Of Fragments, Or Other Nerd Deities Obscures More Than It Illuminates. When People Are Told That A Computer Is Intelligent, They Become Prone To Changing Themselves In Order To Make The Computer Appear To Work Better, Instead Of Demanding That The Computer Be Changed To Become More Useful.

Once You Can Understand Something In A Way That You Can Shove It Into A Computer, You Have Cracked Its Code, Transcended Any Particularity It Might Have At A Given Time. It Was As If We Had Become The Gods Of Vision And Had Effectively Created All Possible Images, For They Would Merely Be Reshufflings Of The Bits In The Computers We Had Before Us, Completely Under Our Command.