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…
Author
Jaron Lanier
24 quotations
About Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, futurist, and composer. Considered a founder 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 wired 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 R…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Jaron LanierIt is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect.
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 been lost.
Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-techn…
What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
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. …
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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 to come from the soul alone.
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where informat…
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 opposed to the business potential.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
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 int…
Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.
The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect …
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…
After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that so…
Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned pers…
My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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.