American writer & computer scientist (1960- )
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
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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
We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... 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
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.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It's somebody's value that's been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it's to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it's to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes--and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.
JARON LANIER
"What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?", Smithsonian Magazine, January 2013