American writer & computer scientist (1960- )
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
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
If we think about the technologies purely in the terms of sort of an artificial intelligence framework, where we say, "Well, if the machine does it, then it's as if nobody has to do anything anymore," then we create two problems that are utterly unnecessary. There's a microeconomic problem, and there's a macroeconomic problem. The microeconomic problem is that we're pretending that the people who do the real work don't exist anymore. But then the macroeconomic level also has to be considered. If we are saying that we're automating the world--which is what happens when you make technology more advanced, and therefore there will be more and more use of these corpora driving artificial intelligence algorithms to do everything, including bread making--if we're saying that the information that drives all this is supposed to be off the books, if we're saying that it's the free stuff, it's not part of the economy, it's only the sort of starter material or the promotional material or whatever ancillary thing it might be, if the core value is actually treated as an epiphenomenon, what will happen is the better technology gets, the smaller the economy will get, because more and more of the real value will be forced off the books. So the real economy will start to shrink. And it won't just shrink uniformly; it'll shrink around whoever has the biggest routing computers that manage that data.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: We're Being Enslaved by Free Information", IEEE Spectrum, Jul. 16, 2013
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
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