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.
People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.
The social media platforms have taken over the distribution of news globally. They treat a lie the same way you would treat a fact.
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Our energy future is choice, not fate. Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have-and it's cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security.
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