Jaron Lanier

1960– · American computer scientist, musician, and author

Topics: software engineering, software design, complexity, artificial intelligence

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

  — Jaron Lanier

• If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

  — Jaron Lanier

• Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.

  — Jaron Lanier

• There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.

  — Jaron Lanier

• There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better.

  — Jaron Lanier

• I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.

  — Jaron Lanier

• The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

  — Jaron Lanier

• The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much.

  — Jaron Lanier

• There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

  — Jaron Lanier

• Digital information is really just people in disguise.

  — Jaron Lanier

• Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

  — Jaron Lanier