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.
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
The Internet made fame wack and anonymity cool.
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection - without pretending that access itself is such a right.
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