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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to appreciate the intellectual beauty of computer science beyond its commercial value.
Jaron Lanier expresses concern that society is becoming overly focused on the financial benefits of computer science, neglecting the inherent beauty and intellectual joy that can be found within the discipline. He calls for a revival of appreciation for the creative and exploratory aspects of technology, urging a balance between understanding its vast potential and recognizing its artistic and scientific value.
In practice
This quote can be used in a technology conference to inspire attendees to appreciate the creative aspects of programming.
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.
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.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
When you go to Japan, there is such a talent shortage that the debate about AI taking jobs is almost non-existent. The debate is, how can we automate this so we can get all the work done?
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.
Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.
Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem.
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