I think the really dangerous part here is not just “surveillance bad”.
It is that AI removes the labour cost that used to limit surveillance.
CCTV was already a problem, but someone still had to watch it, search it, interpret it, escalate it. AI changes that. It makes surveillance searchable, scalable and administratively useful. The shift is from “you may be observed” to “your behaviour can be continuously machine-interpreted”.
That changes the moral shape of the state.
A democracy can have police, courts, borders, audits, fraud detection, and public order. I don’t think the serious argument is that no one should ever be watched. The question is asymmetry.
A free society cannot survive if ordinary citizens become more transparent to the state and its contractors than the state is to them.
The principle should be:
privacy for persons, transparency for power.
Police bodycams should make police accountable. Procurement should be inspectable. Algorithmic decisions should have audit trails. Whistleblowers and journalists should be protected. Public systems should be legible to the public.
What worries me is not only some cartoon version of Orwell. It is the boring version: safety dashboards, risk scores, fraud detection, productivity analytics, immigration enforcement, “trust and safety”, compliance automation, procurement contracts.
The boot does not always arrive as a boot. Sometimes it arrives as infrastructure.
And the hard question is not whether surveillance can create order. It obviously can. So can a prison.
The question is whether it creates accountable power afterwards.
A panopticon may produce “best behaviour”, but only by turning citizens into managed subjects. I have been trying to understand this fetish for controlling people through coercion that seems so prevalent in certain new modern business contexts, like amazon warehouse workers and delivery employees.
The only thing it creates is resentment. Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
> Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
I think this misunderstands their goals. They don't care how society/a company is built. All they care about is that they are the one building it and that they are at the top of the hierarchy.
Just like with the startups and tech companies they built, they see speed as a critical advantage so that they can be the first-mover and establish a moat. Long-term viability and health is a distant secondary or even tertiary concern. If the panopticon and some weirdly neofeudal technofacist society can be built faster than something more egalitarian, then that neofeudal technofacist society is - from their perspective - better and that is what they will bias towards and build.
The panopticon concept from Bentham was interesting because even if there was only a small chance that you might be observed, at any given time, then people would act as if they were being observed. Even if they weren't.
We have had that kind of system, now, for just about everything. Not just from the Big Brother direction, but also the Little Brother direction. At any time, a mob of people might decide to pull up your old digital footprint and condemn you for it.
Likewise, even before AI, at any time the IRS could decide to audit your past tax filings, or data breaches could expose your personal secrets, or street camera can nab you for a traffic violation, or someone could decide to pull up surveillance footage and get you for something, and so on.
The exact degree of difference between the two systems is significant, but much of the marginal psychological burden of such things has already been paid by everyone living in industrial civilization. And, as with the panopticon, just the small chances of active monitoring already provided 80% of the sought-after result.
Indeed, that kind of condition is what people like Ted Kaczynski were so bothered by decades ago.
Those living in the epicenters of civilization, like those in the largest cities, have basically been under almost constant surveillance now for decades.
1. Boring Orwell: Continuous surveillance is already present in the form of cameras in streets, shops, schools, cars, buses, homes, etc. AI can and absolutely will be used to continuously monitor these feeds.
If every violation gets captured hopefully we can have law enforcement and judges that can use their discretion to make sure the "spirit of the law" is what actually results in punishment. Or we fire 80% of them if an AI can outperform them.
By spirit of the law I mean: rolling a stop sign at 1am on a flat country road is not the same as rolling a stop sign in a busy parking lot.
I'm afraid it won’t help as much as we’d like. The algorithm might consider thousands of parameters all of which have scientifically been shown to correlate with some outcome.
A famous example is a denied credit application where one parameter is the battery level of your mobile.
A trail won’t help you decipher why the algorithm decided a particular action.
> this fetish for controlling people through coercion that seems so prevalent in certain new modern business contexts, like amazon warehouse workers and delivery employees.
The only thing it creates is resentment. Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
"Resentment" is a bad-faith interpretation at what it creates. What it creates, and why you see so much of it, is a powerful mechanisms to automate routine business of management and extraction of value.
Hate that I'm biting on this, but this isn't constructive, whereas AI generated or not, the comment above is. It is the top one, it is succinct, and it articulates the point clearly.
You seem to lament AI and given the context of that comment, the author presumably does too. The world is moving faster and faster towards AI first so kicking an screaming "That's AI" will not help. AI generated noise sucks, nut this is not it. We're moving closer and closer to a self-censored, milquetoast internet. Don't bring down a person for putting themselves out there, instead build on their case or build one of your own if you disagree. Shitting on well articulated points only pushes them further out of common discourse. We are all strangers on the internet and owe each other nothing, including this feedback, so do with it what you will.
It's essentially the TVtropes Fascist but Inefficient, but it takes out the grunt work.[1]
The other thing that comes to mind here is Brazil, the movie directed by Terry Gilliam - the inefficiency of the state is part of what makes it evil because it mostly doesn't care if it gets stuff wrong - I wonder how machine intelligence may change that.
Maybe not "you", but how motivated are you to be in control? Not as much as those who angle for the CEO and board chair roles, or to be kingmakers, or to run for various offices. And they very much tolerate being feared.
"In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment,"
That is a near textbook case of abusing statistics. Those things are completely independent variables. Perhaps "civilians" (as opposed to what, military?) killed by police increased because crime increased. Or population increased. Or laws changed. Or bullets changed.
Why would we expect widespread adoption of bodycams to decrease the number of criminals shot and killed by police? That starts with the spurious assumption that the police are randomly shooting and killing citizens in droves without cause and bodycams would put a stop to it. As it turns out, this isn't happening, so bodycams have no influence on the variable.
There's no need to read the rest of that article if the authors are trying to secretly sell such a pejorative opinion.
I invite you to go watch a couple hundred bodycam vids on YouTube. It may change your perspective on what police deal with. What I see consistently, regardless of department, is police bending over backwards and using all kinds of non-lethal force, to the point of risking their own lives, before using lethal force. There are well-publicized exceptions but in the vast majority of cases, the officers are facing someone using lethal force against them.
Man, just write your own comments yourself, no need to use AI-generated ones. You are making good point but the twitter-AI-slop style makes it really annoying to read.
Ellison was among several prominent tech billionaires and executives whose names were mentioned in the multi-million-page tranches of documents made public by the Department of Justice.
Surely you will provide the context of those mentions for us to review? You won't just let us assume they are innocuous mentions like you intended. Right?
People at large became surprisingly fine with heavy surveillance state. It’s not even in any election issue agenda, completely ignored by everyone.
Another unpredictable outcome of social media I guess.
Something about stalking people online and digital exhibitionism, pushed the Overton window of surveillance.
To people like me, who do not have such loud and transparent online presence, this is unsettling. I only now crash head first into modern mentality as it is starting to affect me.
I wonder how long will I be able to evade the databases. Up until now it has been not that hard as long as you have a lot of money, live analog life, pay in crypto/cash and avoid big cities.
And of course, the best behavior will be the behavior that poses zero threat to the people in power. What a great future we have ahead of us, my colleagues.
Of course recordings are to be used against those that threaten the people in power, while those in power enjoy a cone of silence. Same as it ever was.
Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".
What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.
Except China has a well defined culture and millenia of experience with this and has learned how to have an autocratic society that still somewhat serves its people (until it doesn't). The US has been captured by a foreign power that has no interest in the welfare of the people so the expectation is that an autocratic society would be much worse in the US.
They don’t have millennia of experience with a surveillance state. But so far people are accepting it because their economic situation is generally improving. And crime is low. It may change once they have reached the same level of prosperity as the West and growth slows.
Uh, are you sure about that claim regarding surveillance over human history? Just because the technology has advanced does not entail the methods or concepts are novel. Quite the contrary in my view: the modern versions are natural evolutions of long traditions and customs. Having “rats” and “moles” reporting on behavior is, I mean, it predates written records of I’m not mistaken.
And that's what the Larry Ellisons of the world want.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
It's subjective. When I was a kid, "best behavior" didn't include assaulting law enforcement and smearing feces on the walls of Congress, but these days that behavior is acceptable, even officially celebrated.
People usually don't want to follow traffic laws on road. Now that we have AI camera recording and AI fine system, people try their best to follow traffic laws. We are becoming Japan following traffic laws in certain areas.
Police usually were scared to fine million dollars cars (because the car owner might be part of something higher power and they could lose their job). Now they gossip on roadside and let AI do it's job.
To HN people surveillance is scarry. But to us, surveillance is blessings.
Yet it is inevitable that people that are "part of something higher power" will abuse this system for various reasons that have nothing to do with traffic. No thanks. Slippery slopes abound.
Maybe, maybe not. South Asia has a history of very weak government and I'm not sure it will ever, culturally, be able to stomach something stronger. From a Western perspective having experienced authoritarian states, it's understandable to be more hesitant but South Asia has just historically had very few rulers that rule through heavy-handed edict.
Where does it end? What if it hallucinates you robbing an old lady but you just walked past her? Have fun getting swarmed and dragged away. Etc. when will it be used to frame political dissidents?
If anyone managed to stick around through the later, lesser seasons of HBO’s Westworld, they were rewarded with a shockingly plausible view of the world Ellison is describing.
And at a time when most of the computing technology required still seemed like sci-fi. I remember kind of chuckling at the idea that the machine intelligence had made and saved a recording of a random conversation Aaron Paul’s character had with his mother in a diner a decade prior.
I have never been a privacy zealot, but it seems inevitable barring major political action that the panopticon will emerge comprehensive, actionable, and cheap.
You mean, you have not created a meet with the relative who could only join remotely and did not transcribe it for the relatives who could not attend? I am shocked /j
It’s not so much that the recording was made. CCTV has been pervasive in the UK for decades.
It’s that the scalable design & implementation of LLMs & agentic systems has made it plausible to automatically annotate, index, and ultimately extract “value”
from keeping that recording around indefinitely.
That’s the necessary cornerstone to make it worth collecting in the first place.
I think when we look back in 10-20 years, mass nearly universal surveillance will be seen as one of the largest social impacts of AI, or perhaps the largest.
We have barely scratched the surface, and I don't think most people have thought it through.
I guess I appreciate Ellison is educating people about what's going on...
Yeah, LLMs will enable big tech to expand the full surveillance from the online world to the real world, consequently monitoring all aspects of theirs lives.
It's likely gonna take a decade or so for things to become obvious to everyone, just like it took a decade for people to understand the cost of eg. Facebook
I believe surveillance can only work in society at a very small scale.
Surveillance == Information == Power.
Who then, manages the surveillance? You? Me? A government?
How do I trust them?
*Trust* is the fundamental problem with surveillance.
An innocent person was killed on a street. Surveillance camera on every corner of the street would've easily caught the murderer.
Who manages the recording? An individual? Entity? A government? How do I know they aren't face-tagging and selling the data?
It's always about trust.
An interesting case to consider is Seoul, South Korea which actually has cameras almost on very corner of the street. In my view, general population prefers streets recorded to avoid aforementioned situation, and it can only work if people have trust in the government. In the US contrary, my view is that the disconnect between the government and the people are too wide to have such trust.
Somewhat of a clickbait headline. He used "Citizens" in contrast to police, in a discussion about body cameras:
>Another thing: body cameras, we completely redesigned body cameras. [...] Remember this terrible case in Memphis where the 5 police officers basically beat to death another citizen in Memphis, well that can't happen because it would be on TV at headquarters, everyone would see it, your body cams would be transmitting that. The police would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on, citizens would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
I'm not a fan of surveillance, but this article seems weird. The entire article, including the headline, consisting of a single quote, and without adding any context. A charitable interpretation would be that "citizens would be on their best behavior with police, because they know police can check the footage." I'm not necessarily advocating for charitable interpretations, but when you don't even provide the full sentence of the quote, you are not even allowing the reader to attempt to draw their own conclusion.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
Sounds pretty bad, but what’s the context? We should be skeptical of a quote out of context with some dogpile parallels without any other context. When did he say it? Where did he say it?
Be careful what you wish for Larry. If I may point to the examples of Fritz Thyssen, Hugo Junkers, Alfried Krupp...
There are many examples of succesful clever mega-wealthy industrialists who really thought they were above the fray, had it all figured out, and could push all the levers to their advantage.
Most people are not, indeed. So this is the crux of religion: the "god" watches you, and will punish or reward you. Now social media and governments takes over that role.
It's not the recording that matters, it's the enforcement. In PRC, you get your jaywalking mugshot on the intersection jumbotron, that social humiliation is enough to get people in line and establish public order. I wager shameless (individualistic) Americans would troll such methods, i.e. it would be counter productive in US cultural contexts... which is bleak because it means would need even harsher big brother enforcement methods to deter. Considering Chinese aunties fisty cuff with cops on the street, in US they'd get ventilated - the kind of shenanigans US LE would have to pull to enforce best behavior compliance is going to be much more violent.
Nvidia has been marketing "smart cities" for years. I've mentioned it several times but it never gets traction. If you think the AI build out is about consumer benefits you're an idiot. It's about control. AI is going to cement the power structures of the world and give authorities powers they've dreamed of since antiquity. It's about surveillance, manipulation and deception.
I work making AI shovels. I benefit a tiny bit from all this but know it's just a small crumb in exchange for the buffet of freedom.
It is often commented how people who know they are recorded behave a certain way what is not commented on is how people who know they are recording other people behave. When you see your screen and you know you are recording them it creates this "power trip" it's feeling some of us know and love, but when we truly know it we don't love it anymore it's almost like a drug the high feels good the consequences are for others but that little guilt that lingers we don't like that. Now scale it at the size of an organization, the power trip with other people feel even more better, and the consequences ... well
There is another stance which I feel is often overlooked in these discussions, and it is the absolutist 100% pro-“record all the things” realm, which is maybe not as obvious as it may seem at first - but is equally important to protect.
There shouldn’t be a secret surveillance apparatus.
But there should also be a massive human archive of recordings, accessible to all, forever.
Like, I legitimately think beyond the voyeur/exhibition equation, there is a service which governments could be providing to their citizens.
If the NSA is going to copy everything, give me access to my data. I can operate as a responsible citizen of the state, if I have it giving me a metric lifetime of storage.
There are many, many applications where it would actually be fine to have an efficient, well-financed organization, taking care of my personal, private data - properly, standardly, safely - like all the other services it provides citizenry. Standard encryption which allows me to broker my data with third parties, etc.
I’d be a lot less resistant to the surveillance state - of any nature, not just governmental - if it would at least give me access to my data.
Besides which, there are many great reasons to just always be recording.
One thing I would like clarified is whether he is endorsing that future or just making a neutral prediction on what the state of surveillance will likely be.
If they were just recording and it required human labor to interpret it would merely be a traditional regime of totalitarian repression. But this tech allows real time interpretation. Imagine that a stalwart ideologue gets to decide what behavior constitutes hate, and to dispatch enforcement before you can finish rolling your eyes. This is what makes me fear Ilya Sutskever's warning of an infinitely stable dictatorship. It's not clear that gravity well can be escaped.
Just yesterday, I was accosted in a public space by an individual that immediately provoked an aggressive confrontation, falsely claiming that I had invaded their personal space. After that initial accusation, they whipped out a pair of smart glasses and begin recording the conversation. It was not immediately obvious that they were recording, even though I am familiar with such devices. Their devive presumably recorded audio (otherwise what’s the point?), and that is a class A misdemeanor in my state. Of course, that presumes that the police would actually bother to enforce that law in the first place.
It seemed clear to me that the individual was trying to provoke a confrontation, as they framed it in such a way that they were justifying their actions in advance. Much like a bully will tell on onlookers lies to justify the beating they’re giving.
And that’s a problem with panoptic on surveillance, they will edit and frame footage to produce whatever narrative they want to promote. This goes for both state and individual actors. Context is King, and when only one side can provide and control the context, lies can be passed as truth with very little effort.
In which state is that a class A misdemeanor? In some states it's a crime to record phone calls or other private conversations without all-party consent, but I wasn't aware that it was a crime to record a conversation in public anywhere.
I hike in Oregon and I've seen bodycams becoming increasingly common. I don't think that's a bad thing.
It worked well in China because the Larry Ellisons of 35 years ago made sure the CCP was rewarded for keeping the rank-and-file in line and working instead of doing things like organizing for better working conditions or agitating for political change.
What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.
Bryan Cantrill warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.":
While that's pithy, I think it's also incorrect, because it implies that Oracle / Ellison is controllable by us, in the same way a tool / lawnmower is. That's absolutely not true. It has its own motivations that are best-case neutral to our goals.
It might be better to think of ourselves as individual fish in a school of fishes, and Oracle is the boat with a mile long dragnet. It doesn't care about the individual fish; it's not worth it's time to consider us individually. It's thinking in terms of tonnage.
Eh. That quote conflates Ellison and Oracle and I don't think that's correct. I think there's a danger in just accepting that a human being is abhorrent. It _should_ outrage us that Ellison is the way he is. It's silly to think "the lawnmower hates me" because it isn't capable of hate. Ellison is capable of hate and it's not deluded to think he might hate you and I and want to control our lives.
What a strange thing to say. Why would they? Do you have their interest at heart? Do you have the average persons interest at heart? Again: Why would you? That's by definition not how interests work. And that is roughly fine (albeit a kinder universe would be nice).
Even if I have no one's best interest but my own at heart, I can't do anywhere close to as much damage to society at large as a trillion dollar corporation. Also, corporations aren't people, and it's silly to compare individuals to massive organizations.
"An entity with a larger pool of cash than many countries and mutual influence with the government, which everyone agrees should have our best interests" not having our best interest is definitely something I'd consider an interest.
I'd argue that society ensures (or should ensure) that we, collectively, do have the average person's interest at heart. The problem is when billionaires like these effectively decide to opt out of society. Stop paying taxes, bend the political system to their will.
Even if you think of them as the most selfish people possible, billionaires ought to have the average person's interest at heart. Because once the country is full of average people who are unhappy with their lives it typically doesn't work out well for those with power.
The Golden Rule "do unto others" is an example of this concept, and it answers your question "why would you?"
> And that is roughly fine (albeit a kinder universe would be nice).
You're confusing the status quo with what must be. It's possible for people to have a sane interpretation of self-interest. We should do a better job of reeducating and/or removing from society the people who don't seem capable of that.
There's definitely people who blindly praise and romanticize China and ignore how dystopian all the monitoring systems there are, there is essentially no privacy. Even chat apps are infiltrated or Chinese run in some way, shape, or form.
While that’s true, the Chinese government does also seem to be motivated to keep the cost of housing and food low for its citizens, and provide services and facilities for the public good.
Ha, you really believe that? You can't live in area without the permission of the Government. The current Chinese regime seems to be really going kinda crazy with their new leader. They've lost their more practical leadership since the new guy has consolidated power.
It’s not a matter of belief - cost of rent and food in Chinese cities are 50-70% lower than US cities. There are hundreds of sources that will confirm that.
I am not endorsing what China is doing in terms of surveillance by any means, but their argument would be that every nation not subservient to the US got overthrown by CIA backed forces the moment they opened up.
The surveillance tech that is much more likely to be deployed in the US and that few are talking about is Israeli tech used to spy on and suppress the self determination of Palestinians. Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.
> Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.
This has been a thing for a while to be fair. Not sure if you're just mentioning of some new project instead? We've given and gotten back tech to and from Israel.
Signal genuinely isn't, or other end-to-end encryption chat apps. But yeah, WhatsApp and Discord and others are run by American companies that follow US law.
The real question is whether the threshold before it causes irreversible corruption is before or after the point where you can make real change. The latter is obviously quite terrifying as it essentially means that democracy will always be corrupt (unless time is a factor perhaps)
I think resiliency to the corruption isn't evenly distributed among the populace, there are definitely those people who are capable of resisting it long enough to get shit done. I just think it's mostly the levels of abstraction that these people have between them and anything real.
Honestly, if you suggest surveillance state shit, you should just be mandated to livestream your life 24/7, you have nothing to hide right?
The way he phrases it makes it clear he doesn't consider himself or his peers as part of the "citizenry". I suppose subjects or peasants or peons might have been a bit too on the nose, even for him.
every time this comes up I feel it's worth reminding people that this already happened before in American history - 1890's and the robber baron industrialists that monopolized everything.
and who can blame them, if we've learned anything from the last few years it's that the American people are utterly servile and passive when faced with these people, in fact they largely seem to crave their wannabe dictators.
In 2023 when Musk refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the Swedish IF Metall union, not only did the union resist, not only did other unions in Sweden resist, Scandinavian countries together boycotted supply chains including dock- and metalworkers in Denmark and Norway. What would they do in America? Give him money on Twitter to get a blue checkmark and hope he gives them five minutes of attention in a reply.
If you frame it this way in your mind you will be surprised when people pick surveillance over public disorder. If you don't like that world (I don't either) you can't bury your head in the sand about the problems it is solving, you need a "No, but... " framing where you give answers that actually work.
There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.
Does it? Japan is also famously clean, so maybe it’s the ethnic homogeneity? On the other hand, Singapore is very heterogeneous and clean, and eastern Kentucky is very homogenous and run-down. So maybe this whole attributing outcomes of society to singular factors isn’t very founded in science or reason but just gives people an opportunity to confirm whatever biases they have.
The secret is shame. You can enforce behavior through shame culture slowly (JP) or rapidly with technology, half the reason PRC cleaned up fast is people didn't want their faces plastered on misdemeanour jumbotron. Probably won't work if you live in a shameless society where social humiliation has little or even opposite effect.
Japan has historically been a clean and high-trust society.
China was a ground-level low-trust mess even 25 years ago, with fairly rampant fraud and theft by just about anyone you met on the street. That has completely changed — why? I don't think culture evolves that rapidly ex nihilo, when there's an obvious technology answer.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.
Correct.
> Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people
Incorrect.
> it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
Larry Ellison is not interested in public order. The surveillance system isn’t going to be for normal people, it’s going to be for Larry Ellison. California isn’t filthy because it lacks a panopticon; it was cleaned for visiting Chinese dignitaries without one. If Ellison had wanted to clean up the street and has the appeal you think that he does, he could have just run for governor.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets
Clean streets and high speed rail are not a bundled deal with the panopticon - there is no causative linkage. Surveillance - as Ellison plainly mentioned - is for controlling anti-establishment behaviors.
Lookup China subreddits and on YouTube. Tons of Americans wish they could just pick up and move to China. Most Americans that visit China for the first time love it. It is pretty awesome. Have you been?
Sometimes I wonder, if we were actually allowed to engage in the consensual drugs and sex that constitutes 95% of the activity people want to "get away with", would our societal response to infringements on our privacy be even weaker than it currently is?
I think the real risk here is the impact of perfect enforcement of all the tiny things. Enforcement against every minor unsanctioned activity can be self executing with AI. You're going downhill at 10 MPH over the speed limit before you brake, and the camera, if not the vehicle itself, cites you. You cross the street outside of the crosswalk and now you've got 2 strikes. There's nothing to contest, because you acted unlawfully.
You can’t have mass immigration from mainly economic migrants from the third world, under funded police forces, and a legal system built for high trust, highly educated, fairly homogeneous populace at the same time; and expect things to be all happy days.
Look how well it worked for cops! I'm not suggesting we get rid of their bodycams, but it's easily gamed.
It's one thing to be rich and enjoy the luxuries afforded by that, but to buy dominance over the very lives of others is when the angry mob retaliation is entirely justifiable.
Exactly, cops can impose force on you and their jobs requires them to do it. If they wouldn't have body cams, it would be hard to see if coercion was justified or not. Surveilling powerless folks works in the other direction. It only serves to make them easier to discipline and teaches them that deviations from approved behaviour will be deterministically punished. And I also don't believe anyone is currently paid to act on their best behaviour as a simple citizen. Although this kind of monitoring works quite well for children under 6, you don't want paternalistic institutions, since you will never outgrow them.
From what I've seen it goes both ways with bodycam footage. The cops often have to put up with seriously dangerous stupid people and cops on power trips are video'd abusing people. Not that I am defending Ellison. Sadly the rich will always be able to buy their way out of most any bad situation except screwing over richer people.
Funny how stuff like privacy and freedom of speech have always been touted as key differentiators of a liberal democracy. And now the mask is falling off because the interests of the ruling class are increasingly diverging from those of the working majority.
He forgot to mention we'll need 1000 more data centers and 3000 new prisons to manage the chaos. So confused by this billionaire behavior with wanting to control society.
I think the really dangerous part here is not just “surveillance bad”.
It is that AI removes the labour cost that used to limit surveillance.
CCTV was already a problem, but someone still had to watch it, search it, interpret it, escalate it. AI changes that. It makes surveillance searchable, scalable and administratively useful. The shift is from “you may be observed” to “your behaviour can be continuously machine-interpreted”.
That changes the moral shape of the state.
A democracy can have police, courts, borders, audits, fraud detection, and public order. I don’t think the serious argument is that no one should ever be watched. The question is asymmetry.
A free society cannot survive if ordinary citizens become more transparent to the state and its contractors than the state is to them.
The principle should be:
privacy for persons, transparency for power.
Police bodycams should make police accountable. Procurement should be inspectable. Algorithmic decisions should have audit trails. Whistleblowers and journalists should be protected. Public systems should be legible to the public.
What worries me is not only some cartoon version of Orwell. It is the boring version: safety dashboards, risk scores, fraud detection, productivity analytics, immigration enforcement, “trust and safety”, compliance automation, procurement contracts.
The boot does not always arrive as a boot. Sometimes it arrives as infrastructure.
And the hard question is not whether surveillance can create order. It obviously can. So can a prison.
The question is whether it creates accountable power afterwards.
A panopticon may produce “best behaviour”, but only by turning citizens into managed subjects. I have been trying to understand this fetish for controlling people through coercion that seems so prevalent in certain new modern business contexts, like amazon warehouse workers and delivery employees.
The only thing it creates is resentment. Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
> Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
I think this misunderstands their goals. They don't care how society/a company is built. All they care about is that they are the one building it and that they are at the top of the hierarchy.
Just like with the startups and tech companies they built, they see speed as a critical advantage so that they can be the first-mover and establish a moat. Long-term viability and health is a distant secondary or even tertiary concern. If the panopticon and some weirdly neofeudal technofacist society can be built faster than something more egalitarian, then that neofeudal technofacist society is - from their perspective - better and that is what they will bias towards and build.
The panopticon concept from Bentham was interesting because even if there was only a small chance that you might be observed, at any given time, then people would act as if they were being observed. Even if they weren't.
We have had that kind of system, now, for just about everything. Not just from the Big Brother direction, but also the Little Brother direction. At any time, a mob of people might decide to pull up your old digital footprint and condemn you for it.
Likewise, even before AI, at any time the IRS could decide to audit your past tax filings, or data breaches could expose your personal secrets, or street camera can nab you for a traffic violation, or someone could decide to pull up surveillance footage and get you for something, and so on.
The exact degree of difference between the two systems is significant, but much of the marginal psychological burden of such things has already been paid by everyone living in industrial civilization. And, as with the panopticon, just the small chances of active monitoring already provided 80% of the sought-after result.
Indeed, that kind of condition is what people like Ted Kaczynski were so bothered by decades ago.
Those living in the epicenters of civilization, like those in the largest cities, have basically been under almost constant surveillance now for decades.
Your comments have two standout points for me:
1. Boring Orwell: Continuous surveillance is already present in the form of cameras in streets, shops, schools, cars, buses, homes, etc. AI can and absolutely will be used to continuously monitor these feeds.
2. Accountable power: Surely you're joking?!
If every violation gets captured hopefully we can have law enforcement and judges that can use their discretion to make sure the "spirit of the law" is what actually results in punishment. Or we fire 80% of them if an AI can outperform them.
By spirit of the law I mean: rolling a stop sign at 1am on a flat country road is not the same as rolling a stop sign in a busy parking lot.
> Algorithmic decisions should have audit trails.
I'm afraid it won’t help as much as we’d like. The algorithm might consider thousands of parameters all of which have scientifically been shown to correlate with some outcome.
A famous example is a denied credit application where one parameter is the battery level of your mobile.
A trail won’t help you decipher why the algorithm decided a particular action.
> this fetish for controlling people through coercion that seems so prevalent in certain new modern business contexts, like amazon warehouse workers and delivery employees. The only thing it creates is resentment. Is that how you want to build a company or society on. Resentment?
"Resentment" is a bad-faith interpretation at what it creates. What it creates, and why you see so much of it, is a powerful mechanisms to automate routine business of management and extraction of value.
And that automated value extraction creates high levels of resentment. It's not bad faith, just accurate.
That is copied straight from an LLM.
Do folks make no attempt at humanizing their LLM outputs? Is that even worth doing?
I personally wish you guys would - the moment I realize I'm reading an LLM-generated comment, my interest immediately wanes and I stop reading.
Hate that I'm biting on this, but this isn't constructive, whereas AI generated or not, the comment above is. It is the top one, it is succinct, and it articulates the point clearly.
You seem to lament AI and given the context of that comment, the author presumably does too. The world is moving faster and faster towards AI first so kicking an screaming "That's AI" will not help. AI generated noise sucks, nut this is not it. We're moving closer and closer to a self-censored, milquetoast internet. Don't bring down a person for putting themselves out there, instead build on their case or build one of your own if you disagree. Shitting on well articulated points only pushes them further out of common discourse. We are all strangers on the internet and owe each other nothing, including this feedback, so do with it what you will.
It's essentially the TVtropes Fascist but Inefficient, but it takes out the grunt work.[1]
The other thing that comes to mind here is Brazil, the movie directed by Terry Gilliam - the inefficiency of the state is part of what makes it evil because it mostly doesn't care if it gets stuff wrong - I wonder how machine intelligence may change that.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi...
Maybe not "you", but how motivated are you to be in control? Not as much as those who angle for the CEO and board chair roles, or to be kingmakers, or to run for various offices. And they very much tolerate being feared.
Uuuugh. The AI smell is strong on this comment. Please use AI for loads of things, but also pretty-please keep it out of inter-human discussions.
This does not read as AI to me at all
I'm 99% certain it's AI. Lots of short sentences. Very short paragraphs. It's not X, it's Y.
"shape"
Yeah, such words are a giveaway.
Another:
It is not “this simplified, kindergarten-level explanation”, it is “this explicit, thoughtful one”
In this case I suspect the poster used GPT (looks like OpenAI) to generate the initial response and then edited it.
> Police bodycams should make police accountable.
on an often under reported note, police body cams have led to an increase in police brutality as opposed to a reduction.
https://prismreports.org/2024/07/16/complex-troubling-histor...
excellent book on the topic: https://thenewpress.org/books/copaganda/
"In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment,"
That is a near textbook case of abusing statistics. Those things are completely independent variables. Perhaps "civilians" (as opposed to what, military?) killed by police increased because crime increased. Or population increased. Or laws changed. Or bullets changed.
Why would we expect widespread adoption of bodycams to decrease the number of criminals shot and killed by police? That starts with the spurious assumption that the police are randomly shooting and killing citizens in droves without cause and bodycams would put a stop to it. As it turns out, this isn't happening, so bodycams have no influence on the variable.
There's no need to read the rest of that article if the authors are trying to secretly sell such a pejorative opinion.
I invite you to go watch a couple hundred bodycam vids on YouTube. It may change your perspective on what police deal with. What I see consistently, regardless of department, is police bending over backwards and using all kinds of non-lethal force, to the point of risking their own lives, before using lethal force. There are well-publicized exceptions but in the vast majority of cases, the officers are facing someone using lethal force against them.
It's important to keep in mind which bodycam vids make it to YouTube and which don't. You are seeing videos selected for a purpose.
Man, just write your own comments yourself, no need to use AI-generated ones. You are making good point but the twitter-AI-slop style makes it really annoying to read.
Ellison was among several prominent tech billionaires and executives whose names were mentioned in the multi-million-page tranches of documents made public by the Department of Justice.
Surely you will provide the context of those mentions for us to review? You won't just let us assume they are innocuous mentions like you intended. Right?
People at large became surprisingly fine with heavy surveillance state. It’s not even in any election issue agenda, completely ignored by everyone.
Another unpredictable outcome of social media I guess.
Something about stalking people online and digital exhibitionism, pushed the Overton window of surveillance.
To people like me, who do not have such loud and transparent online presence, this is unsettling. I only now crash head first into modern mentality as it is starting to affect me.
I wonder how long will I be able to evade the databases. Up until now it has been not that hard as long as you have a lot of money, live analog life, pay in crypto/cash and avoid big cities.
And of course, the best behavior will be the behavior that poses zero threat to the people in power. What a great future we have ahead of us, my colleagues.
Congrats to those among us building this dystopia. It's not Larry Ellison coding these systems.
Of course recordings are to be used against those that threaten the people in power, while those in power enjoy a cone of silence. Same as it ever was.
Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".
What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.
That is kinda what is going on in China.
Except China has a well defined culture and millenia of experience with this and has learned how to have an autocratic society that still somewhat serves its people (until it doesn't). The US has been captured by a foreign power that has no interest in the welfare of the people so the expectation is that an autocratic society would be much worse in the US.
They don’t have millennia of experience with a surveillance state. But so far people are accepting it because their economic situation is generally improving. And crime is low. It may change once they have reached the same level of prosperity as the West and growth slows.
Uh, are you sure about that claim regarding surveillance over human history? Just because the technology has advanced does not entail the methods or concepts are novel. Quite the contrary in my view: the modern versions are natural evolutions of long traditions and customs. Having “rats” and “moles” reporting on behavior is, I mean, it predates written records of I’m not mistaken.
> The US has been captured by a foreign power that has no interest in the welfare of the people
Huh?
And that's what the Larry Ellisons of the world want.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
“ far too much money and far too little empathy”
There is the old video about the mistake of anthropomorphizing Ellison. You don’t get angry at a lawn mower either when you stick your hand into it.
It's subjective. When I was a kid, "best behavior" didn't include assaulting law enforcement and smearing feces on the walls of Congress, but these days that behavior is acceptable, even officially celebrated.
Somebody has to provide feedback loop and back pressure, so yes, celebrated and needed it is
apparently it will get you elected.
Bangladesh is one of the best example of it.
People usually don't want to follow traffic laws on road. Now that we have AI camera recording and AI fine system, people try their best to follow traffic laws. We are becoming Japan following traffic laws in certain areas.
Police usually were scared to fine million dollars cars (because the car owner might be part of something higher power and they could lose their job). Now they gossip on roadside and let AI do it's job.
To HN people surveillance is scarry. But to us, surveillance is blessings.
Yet it is inevitable that people that are "part of something higher power" will abuse this system for various reasons that have nothing to do with traffic. No thanks. Slippery slopes abound.
Maybe, maybe not. South Asia has a history of very weak government and I'm not sure it will ever, culturally, be able to stomach something stronger. From a Western perspective having experienced authoritarian states, it's understandable to be more hesitant but South Asia has just historically had very few rulers that rule through heavy-handed edict.
Oh wow I went and looked that up after reading your comment. Launched less than a month ago! Incredible that you're seeing such impact already
Yay lazy cops who never did their jobs anyway??
What AI have to do with this? Traffic cameras have been arround since 1834
Where does it end? What if it hallucinates you robbing an old lady but you just walked past her? Have fun getting swarmed and dragged away. Etc. when will it be used to frame political dissidents?
Larry should be a good example and publicize all his communication.
Pretty sure he is on his best behavior all the time.
To be fair, when he was stopped by the police, he was very polite and compliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-8UqcSJDY
Even if he did, the Epstein class already provided that they will get away with everything so what would be the point.
They both own private islands. I'd like to see surveillance of Lanai, you know, for security.
If anyone managed to stick around through the later, lesser seasons of HBO’s Westworld, they were rewarded with a shockingly plausible view of the world Ellison is describing.
And at a time when most of the computing technology required still seemed like sci-fi. I remember kind of chuckling at the idea that the machine intelligence had made and saved a recording of a random conversation Aaron Paul’s character had with his mother in a diner a decade prior.
I have never been a privacy zealot, but it seems inevitable barring major political action that the panopticon will emerge comprehensive, actionable, and cheap.
You mean, you have not created a meet with the relative who could only join remotely and did not transcribe it for the relatives who could not attend? I am shocked /j
It’s not so much that the recording was made. CCTV has been pervasive in the UK for decades.
It’s that the scalable design & implementation of LLMs & agentic systems has made it plausible to automatically annotate, index, and ultimately extract “value” from keeping that recording around indefinitely.
That’s the necessary cornerstone to make it worth collecting in the first place.
1984
I think when we look back in 10-20 years, mass nearly universal surveillance will be seen as one of the largest social impacts of AI, or perhaps the largest.
We have barely scratched the surface, and I don't think most people have thought it through.
I guess I appreciate Ellison is educating people about what's going on...
Yeah, LLMs will enable big tech to expand the full surveillance from the online world to the real world, consequently monitoring all aspects of theirs lives.
It's likely gonna take a decade or so for things to become obvious to everyone, just like it took a decade for people to understand the cost of eg. Facebook
I believe surveillance can only work in society at a very small scale.
Surveillance == Information == Power.
Who then, manages the surveillance? You? Me? A government?
How do I trust them?
*Trust* is the fundamental problem with surveillance.
An innocent person was killed on a street. Surveillance camera on every corner of the street would've easily caught the murderer.
Who manages the recording? An individual? Entity? A government? How do I know they aren't face-tagging and selling the data?
It's always about trust.
An interesting case to consider is Seoul, South Korea which actually has cameras almost on very corner of the street. In my view, general population prefers streets recorded to avoid aforementioned situation, and it can only work if people have trust in the government. In the US contrary, my view is that the disconnect between the government and the people are too wide to have such trust.
Somewhat of a clickbait headline. He used "Citizens" in contrast to police, in a discussion about body cameras:
>Another thing: body cameras, we completely redesigned body cameras. [...] Remember this terrible case in Memphis where the 5 police officers basically beat to death another citizen in Memphis, well that can't happen because it would be on TV at headquarters, everyone would see it, your body cams would be transmitting that. The police would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on, citizens would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
I'm not a fan of surveillance, but this article seems weird. The entire article, including the headline, consisting of a single quote, and without adding any context. A charitable interpretation would be that "citizens would be on their best behavior with police, because they know police can check the footage." I'm not necessarily advocating for charitable interpretations, but when you don't even provide the full sentence of the quote, you are not even allowing the reader to attempt to draw their own conclusion.
https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024... 1:10:03
the classic
— Bryan Cantrillat about 34-39 minutes in:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s]
Sounds pretty bad, but what’s the context? We should be skeptical of a quote out of context with some dogpile parallels without any other context. When did he say it? Where did he say it?
Did you not read the article?
Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.
Be careful what you wish for Larry. If I may point to the examples of Fritz Thyssen, Hugo Junkers, Alfried Krupp...
There are many examples of succesful clever mega-wealthy industrialists who really thought they were above the fray, had it all figured out, and could push all the levers to their advantage.
Is Larry confessing that he's not in his best behavior whenever he's not being recorded?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi
That's what private islands are for.
Most people are not, indeed. So this is the crux of religion: the "god" watches you, and will punish or reward you. Now social media and governments takes over that role.
He has a yacht and owns billions. Need I say more?
It's not the recording that matters, it's the enforcement. In PRC, you get your jaywalking mugshot on the intersection jumbotron, that social humiliation is enough to get people in line and establish public order. I wager shameless (individualistic) Americans would troll such methods, i.e. it would be counter productive in US cultural contexts... which is bleak because it means would need even harsher big brother enforcement methods to deter. Considering Chinese aunties fisty cuff with cops on the street, in US they'd get ventilated - the kind of shenanigans US LE would have to pull to enforce best behavior compliance is going to be much more violent.
I don't think jaywalking deterrence is what society is currently in need of.
Nvidia has been marketing "smart cities" for years. I've mentioned it several times but it never gets traction. If you think the AI build out is about consumer benefits you're an idiot. It's about control. AI is going to cement the power structures of the world and give authorities powers they've dreamed of since antiquity. It's about surveillance, manipulation and deception.
I work making AI shovels. I benefit a tiny bit from all this but know it's just a small crumb in exchange for the buffet of freedom.
China, but we don't get the high speed rail.
It is often commented how people who know they are recorded behave a certain way what is not commented on is how people who know they are recording other people behave. When you see your screen and you know you are recording them it creates this "power trip" it's feeling some of us know and love, but when we truly know it we don't love it anymore it's almost like a drug the high feels good the consequences are for others but that little guilt that lingers we don't like that. Now scale it at the size of an organization, the power trip with other people feel even more better, and the consequences ... well
The "Who's your ideal dinner companion (deceased or alive)?" survey at the end is icing on this cake.
I honestly think I'd rather go hungry at this point.
There is another stance which I feel is often overlooked in these discussions, and it is the absolutist 100% pro-“record all the things” realm, which is maybe not as obvious as it may seem at first - but is equally important to protect.
There shouldn’t be a secret surveillance apparatus.
But there should also be a massive human archive of recordings, accessible to all, forever.
Like, I legitimately think beyond the voyeur/exhibition equation, there is a service which governments could be providing to their citizens.
If the NSA is going to copy everything, give me access to my data. I can operate as a responsible citizen of the state, if I have it giving me a metric lifetime of storage.
There are many, many applications where it would actually be fine to have an efficient, well-financed organization, taking care of my personal, private data - properly, standardly, safely - like all the other services it provides citizenry. Standard encryption which allows me to broker my data with third parties, etc.
I’d be a lot less resistant to the surveillance state - of any nature, not just governmental - if it would at least give me access to my data.
Besides which, there are many great reasons to just always be recording.
One thing I would like clarified is whether he is endorsing that future or just making a neutral prediction on what the state of surveillance will likely be.
If they were just recording and it required human labor to interpret it would merely be a traditional regime of totalitarian repression. But this tech allows real time interpretation. Imagine that a stalwart ideologue gets to decide what behavior constitutes hate, and to dispatch enforcement before you can finish rolling your eyes. This is what makes me fear Ilya Sutskever's warning of an infinitely stable dictatorship. It's not clear that gravity well can be escaped.
Anybody that advocates like this should be the first to sign up for 24x7x365 monitoring. That also includes all their family.
"We" is a very telling way to say that, in the sense that he, a citizen, seems to think he is above such systems. He's not wrong, sadly.
This will only happen in fucked up nations such as the USA, where cameras are popping up all over the place.
He will retreat on his Hawaiian island and obviously nobody will watch him there.
Just yesterday, I was accosted in a public space by an individual that immediately provoked an aggressive confrontation, falsely claiming that I had invaded their personal space. After that initial accusation, they whipped out a pair of smart glasses and begin recording the conversation. It was not immediately obvious that they were recording, even though I am familiar with such devices. Their devive presumably recorded audio (otherwise what’s the point?), and that is a class A misdemeanor in my state. Of course, that presumes that the police would actually bother to enforce that law in the first place.
It seemed clear to me that the individual was trying to provoke a confrontation, as they framed it in such a way that they were justifying their actions in advance. Much like a bully will tell on onlookers lies to justify the beating they’re giving.
And that’s a problem with panoptic on surveillance, they will edit and frame footage to produce whatever narrative they want to promote. This goes for both state and individual actors. Context is King, and when only one side can provide and control the context, lies can be passed as truth with very little effort.
In which state is that a class A misdemeanor? In some states it's a crime to record phone calls or other private conversations without all-party consent, but I wasn't aware that it was a crime to record a conversation in public anywhere.
I hike in Oregon and I've seen bodycams becoming increasingly common. I don't think that's a bad thing.
"best behaviour" doing a lot of work here. Best as defined by the oppressor of course.
If this really happens, people will rebel
"Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." — Roger Scruton
In this case though, the nerds are in charge of it. They created and own it.
I mean even the lawyers are subordinate to them at this point.
> I mean even the lawyers are subordinate to them at this point
They could all be in jail by this time tomorrow if Todd Blanche - a lawyer - wills it. Riding the authoritarianism tiger is risky business.
I'm 100% sure a man like him, with lots of money, will have "interesting" life. The fact that he's willing to be recorded, is he an exhibitionist?
Oh wait, he's exempted?
Lol like EU chat control: politicians vote in favor, and politicians are excluded.
Fear. He's talking about fear. Making every citizen afraid through mass surveillance.
You know, the core part of the book 1984, where a dystopian authoritarian regime rules by mass surveillance, propaganda, and allegiance to one party.
Truth really is crazier than fiction.
To be charitable to Ellison, it worked well in China.
Somehow, we're going to end up with all of the downsides and none of the upsides.
It worked well in China because the Larry Ellisons of 35 years ago made sure the CCP was rewarded for keeping the rank-and-file in line and working instead of doing things like organizing for better working conditions or agitating for political change.
Being charitable to Larry Ellison is one of those things one cannot physically do, like being entertaining to a dead whale.
Reject Larry Ellison from civilization.
Reject Larry Ellison, embrace ...?
and musk, and orange turd, and zuck.
Why most media uses those 30 year old photos of Mr. Elison instead of current ones?
What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.
Bryan Cantrill warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s
While that's pithy, I think it's also incorrect, because it implies that Oracle / Ellison is controllable by us, in the same way a tool / lawnmower is. That's absolutely not true. It has its own motivations that are best-case neutral to our goals.
It might be better to think of ourselves as individual fish in a school of fishes, and Oracle is the boat with a mile long dragnet. It doesn't care about the individual fish; it's not worth it's time to consider us individually. It's thinking in terms of tonnage.
Eh. That quote conflates Ellison and Oracle and I don't think that's correct. I think there's a danger in just accepting that a human being is abhorrent. It _should_ outrage us that Ellison is the way he is. It's silly to think "the lawnmower hates me" because it isn't capable of hate. Ellison is capable of hate and it's not deluded to think he might hate you and I and want to control our lives.
>That quote conflates Ellison and Oracle and I don't think that's correct.
Agreed, he's only 41% of Oracle.
You've fallen into the trap.
I think some of that is just Larry Ellison
You mean ...
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison?
The asshole rot in tech goes much deeper than just Larry Ellison.
Perhaps, but there's only One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
And Google, Meta, etc. None of the big companies habe your interests at heart.
What a strange thing to say. Why would they? Do you have their interest at heart? Do you have the average persons interest at heart? Again: Why would you? That's by definition not how interests work. And that is roughly fine (albeit a kinder universe would be nice).
Even if I have no one's best interest but my own at heart, I can't do anywhere close to as much damage to society at large as a trillion dollar corporation. Also, corporations aren't people, and it's silly to compare individuals to massive organizations.
That is not the point though? I am not saying that there are no issues with big corps and their interests. Them being yours is just not one of them.
"An entity with a larger pool of cash than many countries and mutual influence with the government, which everyone agrees should have our best interests" not having our best interest is definitely something I'd consider an interest.
I'd argue that society ensures (or should ensure) that we, collectively, do have the average person's interest at heart. The problem is when billionaires like these effectively decide to opt out of society. Stop paying taxes, bend the political system to their will.
Even if you think of them as the most selfish people possible, billionaires ought to have the average person's interest at heart. Because once the country is full of average people who are unhappy with their lives it typically doesn't work out well for those with power.
>Why would you?
Because the fundamental building block of society (which we are losing rapidly) is some amount of care for your fellow person.
Your comment is a great example of how we Prisoner's Dilemma'ed ourselves into a world of isolation and decaying institutions.
> That's by definition not how interests work.
It can be. For example, see "enlightened self interest" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest), a concept that the companies in question seem to discard in favor of short-term profits.
The Golden Rule "do unto others" is an example of this concept, and it answers your question "why would you?"
> And that is roughly fine (albeit a kinder universe would be nice).
You're confusing the status quo with what must be. It's possible for people to have a sane interpretation of self-interest. We should do a better job of reeducating and/or removing from society the people who don't seem capable of that.
Some, but definitely not just him.
Bezos' recent CNBC interview was enough of a kick in the nuts to finally get me to migrate off of AWS last weekend.
There's definitely people who blindly praise and romanticize China and ignore how dystopian all the monitoring systems there are, there is essentially no privacy. Even chat apps are infiltrated or Chinese run in some way, shape, or form.
While that’s true, the Chinese government does also seem to be motivated to keep the cost of housing and food low for its citizens, and provide services and facilities for the public good.
Ha, you really believe that? You can't live in area without the permission of the Government. The current Chinese regime seems to be really going kinda crazy with their new leader. They've lost their more practical leadership since the new guy has consolidated power.
It’s not a matter of belief - cost of rent and food in Chinese cities are 50-70% lower than US cities. There are hundreds of sources that will confirm that.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...
China’s food policy is also well documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_policy_in_China
Not to mention buildings last maybe 25 years before they start falling apart. Compared to 70 in the US.
I am not endorsing what China is doing in terms of surveillance by any means, but their argument would be that every nation not subservient to the US got overthrown by CIA backed forces the moment they opened up.
The surveillance tech that is much more likely to be deployed in the US and that few are talking about is Israeli tech used to spy on and suppress the self determination of Palestinians. Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.
> Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.
This has been a thing for a while to be fair. Not sure if you're just mentioning of some new project instead? We've given and gotten back tech to and from Israel.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-us-military - this goes beyond previous technology sharing
usually people romanticize china when they're comparing it to the united states. are chat apps in the US not infiltrated or run by america?
Signal genuinely isn't, or other end-to-end encryption chat apps. But yeah, WhatsApp and Discord and others are run by American companies that follow US law.
Power corrupts. It’s one of the most predictable effects throughout human history.
It’s interesting because it doesn’t seem like it needs to be intrinsic to power, and yet every time someone gains it they eventually become corrupt.
It's so frustrating because even the notionally good actors look at this and think "yeah but it's not gonna corrupt me"
No you fuck, the only way to walk the good path is to give up power and never let it concentrate again.
Larry Ellison of course is one of the most anti human people on the planet and I doubt he was ever anything else.
The real question is whether the threshold before it causes irreversible corruption is before or after the point where you can make real change. The latter is obviously quite terrifying as it essentially means that democracy will always be corrupt (unless time is a factor perhaps)
I think resiliency to the corruption isn't evenly distributed among the populace, there are definitely those people who are capable of resisting it long enough to get shit done. I just think it's mostly the levels of abstraction that these people have between them and anything real.
Honestly, if you suggest surveillance state shit, you should just be mandated to livestream your life 24/7, you have nothing to hide right?
There is an implicit disbelief in human, liberated and civilized by technology, acting civilly by choice and just because it is the right thing to do.
The way he phrases it makes it clear he doesn't consider himself or his peers as part of the "citizenry". I suppose subjects or peasants or peons might have been a bit too on the nose, even for him.
You can understand why - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo
They bought a country for pocket change.
Jeff will be president within 20 years imo.
> Jeff will be president within 20 years imo.
It could be worse, it could be Musk.
Having seen what Americans will vote for, either option is possible.
every time this comes up I feel it's worth reminding people that this already happened before in American history - 1890's and the robber baron industrialists that monopolized everything.
exactly.. and in the near term, if not Jeff directly somebody like JD Vance who is a useful puppet for techbros
and who can blame them, if we've learned anything from the last few years it's that the American people are utterly servile and passive when faced with these people, in fact they largely seem to crave their wannabe dictators.
In 2023 when Musk refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the Swedish IF Metall union, not only did the union resist, not only did other unions in Sweden resist, Scandinavian countries together boycotted supply chains including dock- and metalworkers in Denmark and Norway. What would they do in America? Give him money on Twitter to get a blue checkmark and hope he gives them five minutes of attention in a reply.
If you frame it this way in your mind you will be surprised when people pick surveillance over public disorder. If you don't like that world (I don't either) you can't bury your head in the sand about the problems it is solving, you need a "No, but... " framing where you give answers that actually work.
There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.
Does it? Japan is also famously clean, so maybe it’s the ethnic homogeneity? On the other hand, Singapore is very heterogeneous and clean, and eastern Kentucky is very homogenous and run-down. So maybe this whole attributing outcomes of society to singular factors isn’t very founded in science or reason but just gives people an opportunity to confirm whatever biases they have.
The secret is shame. You can enforce behavior through shame culture slowly (JP) or rapidly with technology, half the reason PRC cleaned up fast is people didn't want their faces plastered on misdemeanour jumbotron. Probably won't work if you live in a shameless society where social humiliation has little or even opposite effect.
Japan has historically been a clean and high-trust society.
China was a ground-level low-trust mess even 25 years ago, with fairly rampant fraud and theft by just about anyone you met on the street. That has completely changed — why? I don't think culture evolves that rapidly ex nihilo, when there's an obvious technology answer.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.
Correct.
> Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people
Incorrect.
> it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
Larry Ellison is not interested in public order. The surveillance system isn’t going to be for normal people, it’s going to be for Larry Ellison. California isn’t filthy because it lacks a panopticon; it was cleaned for visiting Chinese dignitaries without one. If Ellison had wanted to clean up the street and has the appeal you think that he does, he could have just run for governor.
> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets
Clean streets and high speed rail are not a bundled deal with the panopticon - there is no causative linkage. Surveillance - as Ellison plainly mentioned - is for controlling anti-establishment behaviors.
Haha, ground level appeal in a one party government? How would you know? Of course someone likes China's system, but who? How do you know?
He’s talking about shifting attitudes towards China online, not within China itself.
Lookup China subreddits and on YouTube. Tons of Americans wish they could just pick up and move to China. Most Americans that visit China for the first time love it. It is pretty awesome. Have you been?
What I've seen is visitors loving Chinese high speed rail and endless markets, but not loving the Great Firewall.
An average tourist visiting a country - any country - has a much rosier experience of the country than the average person living there long-term.
Sometimes I wonder if all the hype cycles around cryptocurrencies, AI and other stuff were basically just tech powertripping really hard.
Sometimes I wonder, if we were actually allowed to engage in the consensual drugs and sex that constitutes 95% of the activity people want to "get away with", would our societal response to infringements on our privacy be even weaker than it currently is?
I think the real risk here is the impact of perfect enforcement of all the tiny things. Enforcement against every minor unsanctioned activity can be self executing with AI. You're going downhill at 10 MPH over the speed limit before you brake, and the camera, if not the vehicle itself, cites you. You cross the street outside of the crosswalk and now you've got 2 strikes. There's nothing to contest, because you acted unlawfully.
They have been recording.
Reminds me of an old Boogie Down Productions song, "Illegal Business": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHeBotnrwEI
Everything's legal, if the government can see you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Thought_m...
ADD: A local press story about Oracle's CEO and Altman "celebrating" a new DC in my part of the country, with sounds-less-creepy language: https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2026/06/openai-oracle-l...
Not all arms are created equal
Factually wrong. People actually take pride in recording their wrongdoings.
You can’t have mass immigration from mainly economic migrants from the third world, under funded police forces, and a legal system built for high trust, highly educated, fairly homogeneous populace at the same time; and expect things to be all happy days.
Look how well it worked for cops! I'm not suggesting we get rid of their bodycams, but it's easily gamed.
It's one thing to be rich and enjoy the luxuries afforded by that, but to buy dominance over the very lives of others is when the angry mob retaliation is entirely justifiable.
Exactly, cops can impose force on you and their jobs requires them to do it. If they wouldn't have body cams, it would be hard to see if coercion was justified or not. Surveilling powerless folks works in the other direction. It only serves to make them easier to discipline and teaches them that deviations from approved behaviour will be deterministically punished. And I also don't believe anyone is currently paid to act on their best behaviour as a simple citizen. Although this kind of monitoring works quite well for children under 6, you don't want paternalistic institutions, since you will never outgrow them.
In what way did it work well for cops?
From what I've seen it goes both ways with bodycam footage. The cops often have to put up with seriously dangerous stupid people and cops on power trips are video'd abusing people. Not that I am defending Ellison. Sadly the rich will always be able to buy their way out of most any bad situation except screwing over richer people.
By "worked well" I mean for citizens -- there's been multiple cases where cops lied and their bodycam exposed the lie.
> Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.
AI has been moving too fast to care about what some billionaire's opinion on it was 2 years ago.
It wasn't a warning, it was a boast.
Whatever Larry, just don't force us to play your daughters terrible game.
Can we put webcams in larrys home then?
In other words, "We're evil so you can't be".
Not all arms are equal
uh... in a very literal sense upvoting this helps Ellison. I think
Quote from 2024 OP.
Some discussion then and since:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42825097
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413090
"We'll be the only ones capable of manipulating the system if all the citizens are under surveillance"
Funny how stuff like privacy and freedom of speech have always been touted as key differentiators of a liberal democracy. And now the mask is falling off because the interests of the ruling class are increasingly diverging from those of the working majority.
Jan 2010: Jeffrey, Epstein - Chief Financial Officer - ORACLE USA, Inc
https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ConvertT...
Brought to you by Corporation Service Company, the trusted service partner of deep state.
He forgot to mention we'll need 1000 more data centers and 3000 new prisons to manage the chaos. So confused by this billionaire behavior with wanting to control society.