Jaron Lanier

"There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better."

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasnt simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality."

"Im hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology."

"People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience."

"The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also cant change very much."

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."

"Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow."

"Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics."

"The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving Gods existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile."

"If anything, theres a reverse Moores Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

"The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates."

"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory."