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.

- Jaron Lanier

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 information is the highest goal.

- Jaron Lanier

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.

- Jaron Lanier

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.

- Jaron Lanier

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.

- Jaron Lanier

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

- Jaron Lanier

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

- Jaron Lanier

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

- Jaron Lanier

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-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

- Jaron Lanier

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. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

- Jaron Lanier