People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of human creativity and emotion in a world increasingly dominated by machines.
Jaron Lanier argues that for society to thrive, individuals must find ways to monetize their intellectual and emotional contributions. The implication is that if people fail to do so, reliance on technology and machines will grow, potentially leading to a qualitative loss in human value and creativity, as machines become better at producing outcomes traditionally driven by human thought and feeling.
In practice
In a keynote speech about the future of work, you might quote this to highlight the need for human-centered innovation.
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.
Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.
There are no secrets on an successful software project. Both good and bad news must be able to move up and down the ptoject hierarchy without restriction.
People are mobile. They move around, and anytime they want to communicate, if you tie them to the wall or the wires, you're restricting them, you're infringing on their freedom.
Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.
Quite a lot has been written, including by me, about the effect of social media on politics, and in particular the way in which the algorithms built into Facebook and YouTube are more likely to spread angry, extremist and deliberately provocative political language.
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
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