Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
Jaron LanierThere is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
Jaron LanierDigital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.
Jaron LanierThe cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.
Jaron LanierOne good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.
Jaron LanierOnce 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.
Jaron Lanier