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.
Interpretation
The quote warns that advancements in computers will lead to the disappearance of middle-class jobs, as seen through the experiences of creatives like musicians and journalists.
Jaron Lanier likens musicians and journalists to canaries in a coal mine, suggesting that they are early indicators of the detrimental effects of technology on job security. He argues that as computers become increasingly advanced, they will pose a significant threat to middle-class professions, leading to widespread job loss and economic challenges for those in these roles. This reflection highlights the intersection of technology and employment, urging society to consider the implications of automation and AI on traditional job markets.
In practice
During a seminar on technology's impact on jobs, one could quote this to emphasize the need for societal adjustments.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
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.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
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.
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
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