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In Fact, One Reason I Am Interested In Developing Things In Virtual Reality Is That They're So Fascinating. I Can Come Up With Problems That Are Harder Than Warfare To Take Up People's Time.

-Jaron Lanier

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In Fact, One Reason

Jaron Lanier

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In Fact, One Reason I Am Interested In Developing Things In Virtual Reality Is That They're So Fascinating. I Can Come Up With Problems That Are Harder Than Warfare To Take Up People's Time.

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More From Jaron Lanier

A Real Friendship Ought To Introduce Each Person To Unexpected Weirdness In The Other.

People Try To Treat Technology As An Object, And It Can't Be. It Can Only Be A Channel.

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

Siren Servers Are Narcissists; Blind To Where Value Comes From, Including The Web Of Global Interdependence That Is At The Core Of Their Own Value.

Evolution Has Never Found A Way To Be Any Speed But Very Slow.

I'm Not In Any Sense Anti-facebook.

We Imagine "pure" Cybernetic Systems, But We Can Prove Only That We Know How To Build Fairly Dysfunctional Ones. We Kid Ourselves When We Think We Understand Something, Even A Computer, Merely Because We Can Model Or Digitize It.

I Think Most Of The Dramatic New Ideas Come From Little Companies That Then Grow Big.

Advertising Is The Edge Of What People Know How To Do And Of Human Experience And It Explains The Latest Ways Progress Has Changed Us To Ourselves.

Facebook Says, 'privacy Is Theft,' Because They're Selling Your Lack Of Privacy To The Advertisers Who Might Show Up One Day.

The Most Effective Young Facebook Users, However -- The Ones Who Will Probably Be Winners If Facebook Turns Out To Be A Model Of The Future They Will Inhabit As Adults -- Are The Ones Who Create Successful Online Fictions About Themselves.

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.

I Think That One Can Seek A Way To Eliminate War, And Still Agree That Fighting The Nazis Was A Good Thing.

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.

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

As Information Technology Becomes Millions Of Times More Powerful, Any Particular Use Of It Becomes Correspondingly Cheaper. Thus, It Has Become Commonplace To Expect Online Services (not Just News, But 21st Century Treats Like Search Or Social Networking) To Be Given For Free, Or Rather, In Exchange For Acquiescence To Being Spied On.

Digital Technologies Are Setting Down The New Grooves Of How People Live, How We Do Business, How We Do Everything--and They're Doing It According To The Expectations Of Foolish Utopian Scenarios. We Want Free Online Experiences So Badly That We Are Happy To Not Be Paid For Information That Comes From Us Now Or Ever. That Sensibility Also Implies That The More Dominant Information Becomes In Our Economy, The Less Most Of Us Will Be Worth.

I Have Been Around Military Technology People A Lot Because Of My Role In Virtual Reality I've Seen Weapons From Conception To Implementation. And There Is An Extraordinary Gadget Lust That Drives The Military. So It's Possible That War Is Just The Ultimate Expression Of Creativity.

The Nerd Flavor Of Masculinity Has Overwhelmed The Macho Kind In Real-life Power Dynamics, And Therefore In Popular Culture.

Information Doesn’t Deserve To Be Free. It Is An Abstract Tool; A Useful Fantasy, A Nothing. It Is Nonexistent Until And Unless A Person Experiences It In A Useful Way.

The Beauty Of Html Was That One-way Linking Made It Very Simple To Spread Because You Could Put Something Up And Take No Responsibility Whatsoever. And That Creates A Society In Which People Display No Responsibility Whatsoever. That's The Problem.

At A Minimum If We Can Just Have Enough Distribution Of Clout In Society So It Isn't Run By A Tiny Minority, Then At The Very Least It Gives Us Some Room To Breathe.

When You Have A Global Mush, People Lose Their Identity, They Become Pseudonyms, They Have No Investment And No Consequence In What They Do.

Software Breaks Before It Bends, So It Demands Perfection In A Universe That Prefers Statistics.

It's Possible, Without Taking Sides Or Playing The Statesman Game, To Reduce Destruction Simply By Reducing The Development Of Technology Of Destruction.

A File-sharing Service And A Hedge Fund Are Essentially The Same Things. In Both Cases, There's This Idea That Whoever Has The Biggest Computer Can Analyze Everyone Else To Their Advantage And Concentrate Wealth And Power. It's Shrinking The Overall Economy. I Think It's The Mistake Of Our Age.

An Intelligent Person Feels Guilty For Downloading Music Without Paying The Musician, But They Use This Free-open-culture Ideology To Cover It.

In The Sixties, The Hippies Said "make Love, Not War," And That Was Naive. But It Might Be Less Naive To Say "make Music, Not War," In The Sense That The People Who Create Musical Instruments Are The Same People Who Make Up New Weapons.

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.

If We Allow Our Self-congratulatory Adoration Of Technology To Distract Us From Our Own Contact With Each Other, Then Somehow The Original Agenda Has Been Lost.

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.

What Does It Mean To Not Be Alone? I've Approached That Question Through Music, Technology, Writing And Other Means.

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.

The Interesting Thing About Advertising Is That The Things That Annoy Us Sometimes About It Are Really Human. It's Us Looking At Ourselves - And Like All Human Endeavors It's Imperfect.

Here’s A Current Example Of The Challenge We Face. At The Height Of Its Power, The Photography Company Kodak Employed More Than 140,000 People And Was Worth $28 Billion. They Even Invented The First Digital Camera. But Today Kodak Is Bankrupt, And The New Face Of Digital Photography Has Become Instagram. When Instagram Was Sold To Facebook For A Billion Dollars In 2012, It Employed Only Thirteen People. Where Did All Those Jobs Disappear To? And What Happened To The Wealth That All Those Middle-class Jobs Created?

There Is No Difference Between Machine Autonomy And The Abdication Of Human Responsibility.

The Great Thing About Crummy Software Is The Amount Of Employment It Generates.

Information Wants To Be Free.' So Goes The Saying. Stewart Brand, The Founder Of The Whole Earth Catalog, Seems To Have Said It First.i Say That Information Doesn't Deserve To Be Free.cybernetic Totalists Love To Think Of The Stuff As If It Were Alive And Had Its Own Ideas And Ambitions. But What If Information Is Inanimate? What If It's Even Less Than Inanimate, A Mere Artifact Of Human Thought? What If Only Humans Are Real, And Information Is Not?...information Is Alienated Experience.

There's No Question That Males Are More Violent And More Prone To The Type Of Hierarchical Organizations That Lead To War. War Is Largely A Male Activity. In Fact, There Is Some Correlation [between Making War And] Having An Excess Of Males In The Population.

Our Willingness To Suffer For The Sake Of The Perception Of Freedom Is Remarkable.

At The Turn Of The [21st] Century It Was Really Sergey Brin At Google Who Just Had The Thought Of, Well, If We Give Away All The Information Services, But We Make Money From Advertising, We Can Make Information Free And Still Have Capitalism. But The Problem With That Is It Reneges On The Social Contract Where People Still Participate In The Formal Economy. And It's A Kind Of Capitalism That's Totally Self-defeating Because It's So Narrow. It's A Winner-take-all Capitalism That's Not Sustaining.

I Would Argue That Among Musicians Who Work In Technology Today, The Level Of Technological Sophistication Probably Exceeds That Of Military Programs, To Be Blunt. They Are Just Really Smart People Attracted To Making Strange New Sounds.

Making Information Free Is Survivable So Long As Only Limited Numbers Of People Are Disenfranchised. As Much As It Pains Me To Say So, We Can Survive If We Only Destroy The Middle Classes Of Musicians, Journalists, And Photographers. What Is Not Survivable Is The Additional Destruction Of The Middle Classes In Transportation, Manufacturing, Energy, Office Work, Education, And Health Care. And All That Destruction Will Come Surely Enough If The Dominant Idea Of An Information Economy Isn't Improved.

If You Get Deep Enough, You Get Trapped. Stop Calling Yourself A User. You Are Being Used.

A Digital Sound Sample In Angry Rap Doesn't Correspond To The Graffiti But The Wall.

Is War An Inevitable Outcome Of Competing Interests In A Complex Society? In Other Words, Would War Be The Same Even If Human Nature Were Very Different? There Are Mathematical Models Of Large Groups Working Together That Lead To Conflict On A Reliable Basis. So There's A Whole Other View Of War That Is Not Psychological At All.

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.

If You're Old Enough To Have A Job And To Have A Life, You Use Facebook Exactly As Advertised, You Look Up Old Friends.

If There's Any Object In Human Experience That's A Precedent For What A Computer Should Be Like, It's A Musical Instrument: A Device Where You Can Explore A Huge Range Of Possibilities Through An Interface That Connects Your Mind And Your Body, Allowing You To Be Emotionally Authentic And Expressive.

If Anything, There's A Reverse Moore's 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 Cloud Is Driven By Statistics, And Even In The Worst Individual Cases Of Personal Ignorance, Dullness, Idleness, Or Irrelevance, Every Person Is Constantly Feeding Data Into The Cloud These Days. The Value Of Such Information Could Be Treated As Genuine, But It Is Not. Instead, The Blindness Of Our Standards Of Accounting To All That Value Is Gradually Breaking Capitalism.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Musicians And Journalists Are The Canaries In The Coalmine, But, Eventually, As Computers Get More And More Powerful, It Will Kill Off All Middle-class Professions.

Our Times Demand Rejection Of Seven Word Bios.

Eliminating Wickedness Is A Different Project From Eliminating Violence. Eliminating Violence - The Destruction Associated With Wickedness - Is A Practical Program That I'm Very Willing To Pursue.

An Economy Where Advertisers Thrive While Journalists And Artists Struggle, Reflects The Values Of A Society More Interested In Deception And Manipulation Than In Truth And Beauty

I'm An Advocate Of Human Nature.

After My Mother's Death, I Had Such Difficulty Relating To People.

There Were Studies That Asked People In Different Cultures To Draw Pictures Of Their Enemies, And The Pictures All Looked Remarkably The Same. They Always Had Exaggerated Canine Teeth And A Certain Sort Of Expression. That Led To Speculation About Whether At An Earlier Stage In The Human Experience We Were Hunted By Some Sort Of Carnivore.

I'm Hoping The Reader Can See That Artificial Intelligence Is Better Understood As A Belief System Instead Of A Technology.

Artificial Intelligence

Mobs And Dictators Were Made For Each Other, And When Mobs Appear, Dictators Will Soon Flourish.

Made For Each Other

Advertisers Are Not Thinking Radically Enough - They Look For Technology To Lead Instead Of Trying The Neuroscience Approach And Thinking About What Parts Of The Brain Haven't Been Activated Before. These New Experiences Bring New Capabilities To The Brain.

New Experiences

You Have To Be Somebody Before You Can Share Yourself.

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.

If You Listen First, And Write Later, Then What You Write Will Have Had Time To Filter Through Your Brain And You'll Be In What You Say. This Is What Makes You Exist. If You Are Only A Reflector Of Information, Are You Really There?

Google's Thing Is Not Advertising Because It's Not A Romanticizing Operation. It Doesn't Involve Expression. It's A Link. What They're Doing Is Selling Access.

The Attribution Of Intelligence To Machines, Crowds Of Fragments, Or Other Nerd Deities Obscures More Than It Illuminates. When People Are Told That A Computer Is Intelligent, They Become Prone To Changing Themselves In Order To Make The Computer Appear To Work Better, Instead Of Demanding That The Computer Be Changed To Become More Useful.

Criticism Is Always Easier Than Constructive Solutions.

All Over The World Today People Have A Very Strong Desire To Find A Sense Of Identity, And At The Same Time That's Coupled With The Rise Of Absolutely Absurd Wars That Relate To Ethnic Identity. Perhaps There Is Something Deeply Ingrained In People That Relates To A Sense Of Belonging, And Without That, Identity Doesn't Seem As Real As It Should.

I'd Much Rather See A World Where, When You Make Some Quirky Comment On A Blog Or News Story Or You Upload A Video Clip, Instead Of Just A Moment Of Fame For Your Pseudonym, You'll Get 50 Bucks. The First Time That Happens, You'll Realise That You're A Full-class Citizen. You Have The Potential To Make Money From The System.

In History, In Most Cultures, And At Most Points In Time, If You Want To Find The Most Advanced Technologies, You Can Look Principally In Two Places. One Is Weapons And The Other Is Musical Instruments. My Hypothesis Is That Instruments Are Usually Ahead Of Weapons. In Fact, I Think You Can Find Many Examples Of Instruments Being Predecessors Of Weapons And Very Few In The Reverse.

In Fact, One Reason I Am Interested In Developing Things In Virtual Reality Is That They're So Fascinating. I Can Come Up With Problems That Are Harder Than Warfare To Take Up People's Time.

What Is Extraordinary Is That In The United States The Current Culture Desires Feelings Of Machismo And Power, But At The Same Time Has Absolutely No Taste Whatsoever For Even The Slightest Loss Or Bloodshed Or Ickiness. That's A Fascinating Combination.

If You Want To Know What's Really Going On In A Society Or Ideology, Follow The Money. If Money Is Flowing To Advertising Instead Of Musicians, Journalists, And Artists, Then A Society Is More Concerned With Manipulation Than Truth Or Beauty.

Information Is Alienated Experience.

America's Facebook Generation Shows A Submission To Standardization That I Haven't Seen Before. The American Adventure Has Always Been About People Forgetting Their Former Selves - Samuel Clemens Became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac Went On The Road. If They Had A Facebook Page, They Wouldn't Have Been Able To Forget Their Former Selves.

Writing And Thinking Is Not Economically Sustainable.

Writing And Thinking

Anonymous Blog Comments, Vapid Video Pranks And Lightweight Mash-ups May Seem Trivial And Harmless, But As A Whole, This Widespread Practice Of Fragmentary, Impersonal Communication Has Demeaned Personal Interaction.

Create A Website That Expresses Something About Who You Are That Won't Fit Into The Template Available To You On A Social Networking Site.

Of All The Things You Can Spend A Lot Of Money On, The Only Things You Expect To Fail Frequently Are Software And Medicine.

To Me, To Say That War Isn't Evil Is To Say That Nothing Is Evil.

Advertisers And Marketers Should Be Looking To Bring New Experiences To Different Parts Of The Brain. It's A More Profound Idea Than Just Dropping A Billboard Into A Video Game.

New Experiences

My Parents Were Kind Of Like Me In That They Had Tons And Tons Of Weird, Amazing Stuff.

Once You Can Understand Something In A Way That You Can Shove It Into A Computer, You Have Cracked Its Code, Transcended Any Particularity It Might Have At A Given Time. It Was As If We Had Become The Gods Of Vision And Had Effectively Created All Possible Images, For They Would Merely Be Reshufflings Of The Bits In The Computers We Had Before Us, Completely Under Our Command.

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms

Multiple Choice

I've Occasionally Been Wrong About Certain Things, Which Is In A Way More Delightful Than Being Right.

One Good Test Of Whether An Economy Is Humanistic Or Not Is The Plausibility Of Earning The Ability To Drop Out Of It For A While Without Incident Or Insult.

Why Do People Deserve A Penny When They Update Their Facebook Status? Because They'll Spend Some Of It On You.

I'm Astonished At How Readily A Great Many People I Know, Young People, Have Accepted A Reduced Economic Prospect And Limited Freedoms In Any Substantial Sense, And Basically Traded Them For Being Able To Screw Around Online.

If War Stems From Unmet Needs Related To Male Adolescent Ritual, That's Something That We Need To Examine. I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Simply Getting Rid Of War. I'd Be No More Willing To Let Go Of That Than To Let Go Of The Possibility Of Eradicating Cancer. That's Not To Say I'm Certain We Can, But I Am Willing To Use Any Energy At All In The Quest.

If You Love A Medium Made Of Software, There's A Danger That You Will Become Entrapped In Someone Else's Recent Careless Thoughts. Struggle Against That.

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.

Governments Oppress People, But So Do Mobs. You Need To Avoid Both To Make Progress.

The Upheavals [of Artificial Intelligence] Can Escalate Quickly And Become Scarier And Even Cataclysmic,” The New York Times Tech Columnist Once Wrote. “imagine How A Medical Robot, Originally Programmed To Rid Cancer, Could Conclude That The Best Way To Obliterate Cancer Is To Exterminate Humans Who Are Genetically Prone To The Disease.

We Already Knew That Kids Learned Computer Technology More Easily Than Adults, It Is As If Children Were Waiting All These Centuries For Someone To Invent Their Native Language.

I Think Complexity Is Mostly Sort Of Crummy Stuff That Is There Because It's Too Expensive To Change The Interface.

A Market Economy Cannot Thrive Absent The Well-being Of Average People, Even In A Gilded Age.

External Reality Is Sort Of An Affectation Of The Nervous System.

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.

We Should Talk About The Ultimate Cause Of War. It's A Question We Should Never Stop Asking, Because If We Do, There's A Chance, However Remote, That We Might Miss An Opportunity To Reduce The Occurrence Of War.

Individuals Achieve Optimal Stupidity When They're Given Substantial Powers While Being Insulated From The Results Of Their Actions.

The Problem I Have With Socialist Utopias Is There's Some Kind Of Committees Trying To Soften Outcomes For People. I Think That Imposes Models Of Outcomes For Other People's Lives. So In A Spiritual Sense There's Some Bit Of Libertarian In Me. But The Critical Thing For Me Is Moderation. And If You Let That Go Far You Do End Up With A Winner-take-all Society That Ultimately Crushes Everybody Even Worse.

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.

I Do Real Paintings, You Know. I'm A Little Messy In The Studio, So I'm A Bit Of A Danger. But I Just Adore It.

The Most Important Thing About A Technology Is How It Changes People.

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.

Style Used To Be An Interaction Between The Human Soul And Tools That Were Limiting. In The Digital Era, It Will Have To Come From The Soul Alone.

There Is Nothing More Gray, Stultifying, Or Dreary Than Life Lived Inside The Confines Of A Theory.

Services Like Google And Facebook Only Exist Because Of The Social Acceptance Of A Mass Amount Of Distributed Volunteer Labor From Tons And Tons Of People.

Books Are Really, Really Hard To Write. They Represent A Kind Of A Summit Of Grappling With What One Really Has To Say

We Have Repeatedly Demonstrated Our Species's Bottomless Ability To Lower Our Standards To Make Information Technology Look Good.

I Think Seeking Perfection In Human Affairs Is A Perfect Way To Destroy Them.

Every Time We Give A Musician The Advice To Give Away The Music And Sell The T-shirt, We're Saying, "don't Make Your Living In This More Elevated Way. Instead, Reverse This Social Progress, And Choose A More Physical Way To Make A Living." We're Sending Them To Peasanthood, Very Much Like The Maoists Have.

A Remarkable Thing About The Silicon Valley Culture Is That Its Status Structure Is So Based On Technical Accomplishment And Prowess.

It's As If You Kneel To Plant The Seed Of A Tree And It Grows So Fast That It Swallows Your Whole Town Before You Can Even Rise To Your Feet.

Spirituality Is Committing Suicide. Consciousness Is Attempting To Will Itself Out Of Existence.

It Is Impossible To Work In Information Technology Without Also Engaging In Social Engineering.

There Will Always Be Humans, Lots Of Them, Who Provide The Data That Makes The Networked Realization Of Any Technology Better And Cheaper.

Chemotherapy Is A Good Thing Even Though It Kills Healthy Cells. But We Still Hope For Something Better. We'd Like To Prevent Cancer In The First Place.

Linux Is A Superbly Polished Copy Of An Antique - Shinier Than The Original, Perhaps, But Still Defined By It.

Funding A Civilization Through Advertising Is Like Trying To Get Nutrition By Connecting A Tube From One’s Anus To One’s Mouth.

One Thing That I Have Been Trying To Do Is Bring Together In Places Like Bosnia Technologists Who Create Ever-more Destructive Land Mines [and Convince Them Not To Build More Dangerous Mines]. And That Has Actually Worked.

We Should Treat Computers As Fancy Telephones, Whose Purpose Is To Connect People.... As Long As We Remember That We Ourselves Are The Source Of Our Value, Our Creativity, Our Sense Of Reality, Then All Of Our Work With Computers Will Be Worthwhile And Beautiful.

The Network By Itself Is Meaningless. Only The People Were Ever Meaningful.

Humans Change Themselves Through Technology.

People Degrade Themselves In Order To Make Machines Seem Smart All The Time.

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