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Jaron Lanier Quotes

Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. Considered a founding father of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.Lanier has composed classical music and is a collector of rare instruments; his acoustic album, Instruments of Change features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. Lanier teamed with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film, The Third Wave . In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the TIME 100 list of most influential people. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. May 1960
Jaron Lanier photo
Jaron Lanier: 14 quotes2 likes

Famous Jaron Lanier Quotes

“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.”

Jaron Lanier

Digerati: Encounters With the Cyber Elite, (1996), ed. by John Brockman

“Digital information is really just people in disguise.”

Jaron Lanier

Who owns the future? (2013)
Who owns the future? (2013)

“The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much.”

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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.”

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.”

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Jaron Lanier Quotes

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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.”

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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.”

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Jaron Lanier

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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