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.
We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.
Most of the value of deep learning today is in narrow domains where you can get a lot of data. Here's one example of something it cannot do: have a meaningful conversation.
Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.
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