Jaron Lanier Quotes About Design
-
The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share
→ -
Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.
→ -
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
→ -
Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.
→ -
When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.
→ -
I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.
→
Related Authors
-
Andy Hertzfeld Computer Scientist -
Clay Shirky Writer -
Bill Gates Investor -
Toru Iwatani Video Game Designer -
Nicholas G. Carr Writer -
Gary Kildall Computer Scientist -
Scott Kim Computer game designer -
Ivan Sutherland Computer Scientist -
Butler Lampson Computer Scientist -
Francesca Lia Block Writer -
Charles Simonyi Executive -
Evgeny Morozov Writer -
Ray Kurzweil Author -
Rebecca MacKinnon Blogger -
Bob Frankston Software Developer -
Andrew Keen Entrepreneur -
John Warnock Computer scientist -
Ray Ozzie Software Architect -
Jef Raskin Computer Scientist -
Dan Bricklin Software Developer