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

I think some of that is just Larry Ellison

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if all the hype cycles around cryptocurrencies, AI and other stuff were basically just tech powertripping really hard.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Larry should be a good example and publicize all his communication.

Pretty sure he is on his best behavior all the time.

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...

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.

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.

Why most media uses those 30 year old photos of Mr. Elison instead of current ones?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Anybody that advocates like this should be the first to sign up for 24x7x365 monitoring. That also includes all their family.

Is Larry confessing that he's not in his best behavior whenever he's not being recorded?

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.

"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.

If this really happens, people will rebel

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.

He will retreat on his Hawaiian island and obviously nobody will watch him there.