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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.
Oh wait, he's exempted?
Everything's legal, if the government can see you.
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...
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.
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.
AI has been moving too fast to care about what some billionaire's opinion on it was 2 years ago.
Some discussion then and since:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750
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.
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison?
Bezos' recent CNBC interview was enough of a kick in the nuts to finally get me to migrate off of AWS last weekend.
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.
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.
They bought a country for pocket change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Honestly, if you suggest surveillance state shit, you should just be mandated to livestream your life 24/7, you have nothing to hide right?
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.
Agreed, he's only 41% of Oracle.
An average tourist visiting a country - any country - has a much rosier experience of the country than the average person living there long-term.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
2. Accountable power: Surely you're joking?!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
Pretty sure he is on his best behavior all the time.
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...
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
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 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.
Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.
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.
I honestly think I'd rather go hungry at this point.
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.
That's what private islands are for.
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.
I hike in Oregon and I've seen bodycams becoming increasingly common. I don't think that's a bad thing.
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.
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.
Huh?
When I see someone post an LLM reply, it makes me wonder - is the reply synonymous with their actual opinion, only formatted better? Or are they attempting to disguise an LLM output as something of their own? The former I am much more OK with, but the latter irks me for reasons I haven't fully considered and you have me thinking about.
"Calling out" AI comments has felt like somewhat of a duty, heh, but maybe we've reached a point of no return. I still value a real, organic opinion, though, no matter how well an AI can summarize it.
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.
The it's-not-X-it's-Y formula is the most visible tell. It's overused, being used, I think, 3 times, with 2 being slightly less obvious. This-was-X-and-now-it's-Y is also overrepresented.
It's still not a bad comment. We can discuss it just fine. What we can't do now is assume this is entirely an EastLondonCoder's text, so we can't use it to form an opinion of that person (whether good or bad) based on its content (since we don't know how much of it comes from that person, and how much from the machine). Some will also form an opinion (good or bad) about the poster simply because they used AI.
That's an Internet discourse of 2026, in my experience. I wonder what's next.
So far as I can tell, AI prose checking - at least vs the frontier models - has been little better than vibe-based. Which, well, that's just another way of saying Red doesn't like Blue. And we got enough of that.
There are plenty of them that will give you a number, Pangram is a commonly-used one. Of course, whether they actually work well is a different matter. In my experience they have a huge false positive rates. I haven't tested the inverse.
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.