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.
Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.
The Internet, in general, I find troubling. The anonymity has made us all meaner and dumber. This thing that was supposed to bring us closer together, I see it doing the opposite.
From now on, the technology companies that succeed will be those that have developed skills at listening and a sophisticated understanding of their customers' industries.
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
I just believed. I believed that the technology would change people's lives. I believed putting real identity online - putting technology behind real identity - was the missing link.
In my opinion, right now there's way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them.
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