Larry Ellison: vast AI surveillance can ensure citizens are on best behavior (2024)
businessinsider.com
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The technology is already here, and there would also be clear upsides, especially for private citizens trying to protect themselves, but the end result is that we end up in a surveillance state. Arguably, we may already be in one.
Every country has has this ability for much longer.
The problem with this statement is it's historically inaccurate. Cops have been pilfering through suspects' things with no reason since the dawn of our republic. (Landowners, on the other hand, could stand their ground.)
The better argument is we have advanced enough that this should be illegal.
Not at all. It's the 4th Amendment. It's particularly clear on this point. Perhaps "historically inaccurate" is not the phrase you meant to use. You might also notice that the CIA itself believes these activities were and are illegal. See "Project HTLINGUAL."
> Cops have been pilfering through suspects' things with no reason since the dawn of our republic.
They get warrants first or they are, in fact, committing a crime. It is, admittedly, a difficult crime to prosecute, but further evidence against your phrasing is that this is in fact a crime that does get charged.
> Landowners, on the other hand, could stand their ground.
Owning land is not at all a distinction. "Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects" are. That land is not a part of this enumerated list is actually a particular point in the enforcement of this law and creates a "plainly visible" standard that is applied by courts.
> The better argument is we have advanced enough that this should be illegal.
It's illegal. Full stop. Vagaries of enforcement are not material to this point.
Mapp v Ohio is one of the most landmark cases in 4th amendment law and the ruling came down in 1961. So when someone tells you that your maximalist interpretation isn’t historically accurate, they aren’t harkening back to colonial era rules.
If the lawmakers openly demonize and marginalise the unprivileged (minorities, dissenters, protestors), then it is safe to assume that it is already the case, just unevenly applied, so that the majority would continue to support the State as it increasingly grows restless with the fringe even more.
The latter is surely more frightening.
How long until corporations start organizing their own private militias, I wonder?
Many ultra-high-net-worth individuals hire them. It's no secret, they've been doing it since the 60s when kidnap and ransom insurance started being a serious thing, and it's only intensified over time. There was an interesting "bolt hole" real estate listing that claimed years supply of food, water, housing etc. for a "company sized group of security contractors" as an amenity.
[1] G4S, the largest PMC company, founded in 1957
Private security has been a thing for millenia!
If there’s no repercussions, why not be transparent? Scary indeed, as it’s quite telling of the direction we’re headed in, IMHO.
What would you change about the present situation? I feel that public protest is roughly all that can be allowed in response to speech (ie, speech in response to speech). Surely he shouldn't be jailed/fined/doxxed for this speech? What more should be allowed? Or is it just that the public protest isn't as strong as you'd want?
This is a difficult task, because people with decision-making power tend use that power to alter the system to solidify their position.
Capitalism, at its finest, does this by letting people make bad decisions with their money until they haven't got any. This was an improvement on, say, holding wars until enough people decision-makers get killed off. However, a variety of long-term policy shifts have meant this no longer appears to happen - merely possessing capital is so profitable that even astonishingly poor decisions cannot reduce your wealth enough to matter.
IMO, through this statement Larry Ellison has demonstrated the kind of poor judgement which a functional society cannot tolerate in a decision-maker, and lacking an effective way to remove this from the decision-maker pool is the primary cause of societal trouble today.
Fwiw I agree with you in disliking the “eternal power“ dynamic that seems to come with being rich. I’d prefer to solve this by requiring more disclosure in lobbying efforts, restricting the kinds of donations you can make, etc. Money shouldn’t lead to political power IMO.
I'm saying that a system in which someone with poor judgement manages to accrue his level of assets is broken somewhere.
Policy settings under which "having capital" allows you to grow your wealth while making terrible decisions are bad policy settings.
Various alternative policies exist, the most obvious of which is adjusting taxation settings such that growing your wealth requires consistently making good judgement calls.
I'm pointing out that across a great many economic nations, times, and economic systems, the core problem of every social system is not the obvious stuff like "how do we allocate resources" - it's "how do we remove bad decision-makers" - because those people are implementing "how we allocate resources".
There's a great many ways to solve this problem, but there's little evidence that _anything_ is currently being tried. I'd support any policy that seemed reasonably likely to improve this situation.
Historically speaking though, wealth inequality in developed nations is reaching a point at which, as often as not, revolutions happen. Sometimes they're bloody. Sometimes not. There are two approaches to avoid a revolution:
1. Back off from controlling government and let reform happen gradually. Your wealth will be lessened, but you'll probably remain one of the richest people alive.
2. Lock everything in with a totalitarian panopticon state that you control. AI surveillance offers a huge advantage over surveillance networks used by past totalitarian regimes. e.g. East Germany's Stasi showed the limitations of surveillance in an age where humans had to do it themselves. With AI to do it, you can avoid employing a large portion of the population to watch the rest, and you can keep the power of that surveillance network concentrated in just a few hands, preferably yours.
It's clear which approach is being attempted in the U.S.. I'd just point out that #2 is inherently high-risk. If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle. If it breaks, the result could be a bloodbath. Approach #1 is much safer. Yet, here we are.
> If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle.
I do not believe Approach #1 has ever been attempted without quite a bit of blood leading up to its attempt, and I think it has only been attempted a few times even so, approach #2 - oppression, with resulting bloodiness - seems to be the norm.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2009/12/09/1989-poland-was-fi...
One reason for that is that when an occupying power leaves regime change must happen.
That happened for example in Romania in 1989, somehow it did not happen in Poland.
Look at Syria for how a similar pattern of events did lead to civil war. Ceaușescu just didn't represent a section of the country with an interest in fighting for his regime. The risk of instability when an authoritarian passes is if they have been holding together a country with significant ethnic/sectarian/political divisions like Yugoslavia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon
Of course Oligarchs still took power afterwards from time to time - The Eupatridae (Aristocratic Families), then tyranny by Peisistratos.
Mass of people that will not revolt and storm the castles because they will have computer games, recreational drugs and not so bad life.
That will not care about voting so 1. would not happen and 2. would not end up in French style revolution as they wouldn’t mind state control.
And if AI is what the developers hope it to be, the fictional reference points would expand to anything from Manna to The Culture to I Have No Mouth.
A panopticon thus exists in phases. first phase (centralized) to buy time, stabilize a complex society, then to help forward a gracefull decay, finally (decentalized) to prevent the decayed and loopstuck society from further self damage and keep complexity recover vectors open.
The dream is a Afghanistan with phones that can bootstrap itself out of the failed state.
No offense but you're just injecting a trendy opinion without knowing anything about the man's history. Ellison was notorious even in the '90s-'00s and never made any real effort to hide it. The book "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" (yes, that's its actual title) came out all the way back in 2003, the title being a quip that had already been circulating for many years by that time.
And two, he’s at an age where people lose any sense of self-awareness, shame, filters - all that shit.
Anyways I don’t think he cares that it makes him sound Orwellian. I suspect he’s fine with being Orwellian outright. Not having what he has is as unimaginable as for all of us having a fraction of what he has. It’s too much of a stretch for someone like that to extent so much to imagine.
And yeah it’s frightening, it’s why we did away with autocratic Sun King calibre aristocracy/royalty and all that. We can expect all the other zillionaires to follow this path reliably over the next few decades.
With Musk swinging his arm to in the air to hail his führer it really feels like the defining moment of new age rich people, don’t get me wrong the build up was there but this is just the moment that best encapsulates it all.
The best person to personify the old age I’d say is Bill Gates, awful person behind the curtains I’m sure, real buddy buddy with Epstein but he did the whole “caring for humanity” shtick, he donated bits of his money, y’know he at least took some effort to make it seem like he cared.
We're five days into the Presidency. And Musk has stumbled across power the sorts he hasn't really had to wrangle with before. I'd be shocked if he comes out in 2028 better off, materially, than he is now.
Xi makes a lot less than Jack Ma, but I think that he showed him who's In Charge.
?
Ma has power over the money, but Xi has power over Ma's body.
Rich people often think that money is everything (and they are usually correct), but there are some things that money can only buy, when facing a bat with nails driven through it.
How much you “make” is a silly concept in many places in the world. “People with guns listening to you” is the real power.
Anyone talking about how much they "make" isn't rich (in the respect we're discussing) in any society.
Were those ties more business and philanthropic oriented or socially oriented?
I found this while searching for details surrounding the ties between the two:
The billionaire has acknowledged that he "shouldn't have had dinners with him" while his ex-wife Melinda French Gates said the business and technology magnate's relationship with Epstein played a role in their divorce.
However, the claim that Gates visited Epstein's private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands 37 times has not been substantiated.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-bill-gates-visit-eps...
Most people around 60-70 usually become quite shameless and cringey in one way or another.
As for Gates, he was dragged through anti-trust at a time when there were no other tech billionaires to team up with. His tech did not give him global reach - he just made a lot of money on office cubicle software back then.
But generally, yes. Absolutely - guy throwing salute is a defining moment of zillionaire IDGAF. Anti-trust success or failure is going to become the defining turning point for millennial generation.
Any crime he commits can be figured out in courts with his high-priced lawyers so the idea that AI constantly watching you would be repressive seems misplaced to Larry.
For people that think I'm joking, at one point his primary philanthropic contributions were almost exclusively to life-extending efforts:
>Take the massive amount of money he once gave to life-extension research, which was the core focus of his philanthropic efforts.
>And so over the course of 15 years at the beginning of the 21st century he would donate over half of a billion dollars for anti-aging medical research, at a time when the field was seen as fringe science.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/24/21369773/larry-ellison-...
Thousands of open source projects would support Oracle in short order.
He's joining the attention economy. Saying something stupid but provocative yields earned social media. Larry Ellison saying something sensible wouldn't make HN's front page.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin NiemöllerDo not anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
With kitchen knives. And yeah they catch it on camera, but they didn't prevent it.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/larry-ellisons-golden-ag...
I literally read that as "supervillain" when I first read it.
I gotta say, I know that billionaires live in their own private world - in many sense of the word - but this is just wildly naive.
If Stazi and KGB had the tech we have today, we’d be still having DDR,Warsaw Pact, and Iron Curtain.
Ellison speaks the future. Quoting Mike Tyson „and whatcha gonna do 'bout it”. Ellison even has a database and a programming language he’d like to sell you to make that happen.
Conformance enforcement only gets you more of the same behaviour. It denies access to variation that engenders innovation.
Exploration vs exploitation.
Leviathan vs Behemoth. Russia could be a strong land power, à la Rome. America is a maritime power, ruling via alliances and trade, à la Carthage. (Or Athens. Or the British or Dutch.)
Plenty of billionaires have gone to jail or gone bankrupt.
> Anyone can sell their soul for a price
But not for any price. Anyone who thinks they could build an Apple or Microsoft or even Oracle is probably not being honest about their own limitations.
He does not understand or want citizenship, he wants peons.
Europe is slowly but surely pushing for it as well.
What about non-citizens.
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750
“in 2019 a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison. The lawsuit accused Ellison and others of conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide.”
And that we pass laws to make it that systemic mis-identification should be classed as criminal negligence. Just to ensure everyone is on their best behaviour and not overstating the reliability of AI.
Full surveillance should be installed to every single billionaire. AI can really help us to reduce criminality and keep billionaires in best behavior.
but I clicked on the article I see that Larry Ellison is a billionaire, of course he wants AI surveillance for his workers. I doubt he’ll let this AI he is thinking of surveill him though.
Awful idea, don’t think again.
It's more instructive to think of Larry Ellison as the lawnmower in the billionaire salad.
Nothing will happen. They're supervised currently and many carry body cameras. The public is entitled to complain about their behavior and there is an internal affairs unit. If none of this is currently working then simply turning up you observations will likewise do nothing.
> Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
That's not how human citizens work. It's hard to believe that someone so well connected can project such parochial and theocratic false ideas about the world.
> Ellison also expects AI drones to replace police cars in high-speed chases. "You just have a drone follow the car," Ellison said. "It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
Larry, the reason we chase people, is because they can get to a location and further victimize people. Knowing where they are is half the battle, the other half is going there and getting them into custody.
The demented mind of a spoiled child. This is what happens to you when you refuse to compete and instead lean into your state connections to earn your lifestyle. Disgusting, really.
I want to live in a society where bad behavior isn’t incentivized.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"[1]
I think you know what is unjust about slavery. Dictatorship. Apartheid. Disenfranchisement of women.
> I want to live in a society where bad behavior isn’t incentivized.
Oppression is bad behavior. Protest is not.
Our society has become so both-sides-pilled that one side being right about an issue is no longer even theoretically possible. No matter how correct a conclusion might be, it would get dismissed as cable news echo-chambery. It would be called a derangement syndrome. It's like people believe there's a fixed law of the universe, a law of conservation of debate. All debates will always exist in equilibrium, no matter where the fulcrum meanders over time.