> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said
He's not even trying to frame it as "the weight of crime will be lifted from the people so they can prosper". It's "citizens will be on their best behavior". I've got a suspicion that he envisions a separate world for himself that does not involve such monitoring.
Mid-covid lockdown when the virus was still fresh Larry emailed the entire company letting us know he was moving permanently to his private hawaiian island in order to "make it a better place" with the locals.
It will still have that monitoring it will just be under his control with multiple layers of deletion possible depending on the severity of his crimes the cameras pick up (if there is a fire in his server room you can be pretty sure he raped or murdered someone). Atleast this is the silent part you are not supposed to say out loud that i picked up vibing from his comments.
If the goal of surveillance is behavior control, then invisible-to-camera status can become a commodity to be turned on/off based on evolving priorities, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41563571. A few years ago, there was news coverage of an invisible-to-surveillance list in China.
An excellent book. I spent the first part of my life thinking it mainly spoke to the past (we learned our lesson, right?), and that a Brave New World style future was more likely, but now I think it’s deeper than that. Totalitarianism shows up because of a flaw in the human psyche, and we need to be fucking CAREFUL.
I wonder how behavior is defined exactly. Will future societies track eye focus and build a profile over time attached to a facial recognition database? Inappropriate gazing
“It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City
In Iran, AI powered facial recognition cameras are being rolled out to catch out any women who dare disobey their religious clothing rules. Once caught, these women often face severe abuses at the hands of the state.
The state in this case believes this is "good behaviour", but this would be shocking to most HN readers. This is a good example of why you should never give one person or organisation too much power.
I agree about one person or organisation too much power, and fear the potential for abuse, but the problem in the Iran example are the theocratic laws, not really the tools that help enforce them. Good behaviour is already defined by each nation's legislation.
some tools make it too easy to enforce bad laws at scale. it's a lot of work for the morality police to catch up to every woman who removes her hijab and cart her to jail. unless you're watching all the women all the time, they'll often get away with it. mass surveillance really takes a lot of the legwork out of running a repressive regime.
This has a broader purpoae in democracy. Laws change as people realize they are stupid and disobey them then opinion changes and the law catches up. The chance of being caughy and/or the punishment cant be too high to short circuit this for all but the most obviously bad crimes (ie murder, large scale theft, rape)
To be intentionally provocative, who are we as a morally bankrupt capitalist-imperialistic-colonialist-white-supremacist-nation-built-on-slavery to tell the noble and pious people-of-color of the Middle East what they can and cannot do with their culture?
People. We're people, and as such we get to make moral judgements. And it's obviously and pretty straightforwardly not okay to force women to cover themselves head to toe.
This particular example is not even difficult to deduct from some pretty basic axioms of morality, mainly that disadvantaging someone on the basis of their sex is wrong and that people should have personal freedom so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others.
When I read about the women who, just a few years ago were able to chat and laugh in public, wear whatever they want, go to school, college, work and are now beaten/jailed/stoned/murdered for these things?
I think this ‘provocative’ comment has forgotten the human element in this.
I believe that is his point. You (and most of us here) might think that this behavior is bad... But those people believe it is right. Who makes the decisions about what is right and what is wrong? There are Muslim women right now that march in Britain in the name of Sharia. Surely they should want more freedom and rights, and yet there they are, dressed in all black garb marching for their "oppressors"
> There are Muslim women right now that march in Britain in the name of Sharia
This gets so overblown especially by people who benefit from this idea being spread, while the truth is that the amount of people who actually do want Sharia is very low and the amount of people who are actually "marching" to get it implemented is even lower.
If democratic self-governance relies on an informed citizenry, Penney wrote, then “surveillance-related chilling effects,” by “deterring people from exercising their rights,” including “…the freedom to read, think, and communicate privately,” are “corrosive to political discourse.”
.. “Governments, of course, know this. China.. wants people to self-censor, because it knows it can’t stop everybody. The idea is that if you don’t know where the line is, and the penalty for crossing it is severe, you will stay far away from it.. if your goal is to control a population,” Schneier says, “mass surveillance is awesome.”
.. The social challenge now, [Zuboff] says, is to insist on a new social contract.. “We have to create the political context in which privacy can be successfully defended, protected, and affirmed as a human right. Then we’d have a context in which the privacy battles can be won.”
Oracle sells to entities who want the processing capabilities and OLTP. Ellison is a dinosoar survivor of another era. Not every play he makes is awesome but he is a survivor. If he says this, there will be a reason behind it which goes to Oracle's bottom line.
Not the politics, not what he really thinks: A reason which matches a market opportunity he thinks Oracle can seize.
Cities like London and a lot of larger Chinese cities already have the majority of the city under continuous surveillance. It’s only a matter of feeding that data into an LLM. It’s already within reach.
The system Ellison describes is one where we know we're under surveillance at all times, so we behave. At the very least, that belief has yet to pervade Western society
We are the ones who would know because we are the ones who would build it. We would at least know that someone is working on it, what it would take to implement and how long it would take to set up.
Entire miniature cities are being erected for police training. Drones with recordings of babies crying are being used to lure and gun down people in israel.
There is no doubt that this dystopian view deserves immediate condemnation, but that doesn't meant that there wasn't one possible good idea in there. Don't watch people, just watch the watchmen:
"Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person."
That will never happen. There’ve been any number of transparency rules that somehow never make it into production. Look how hard it is today to get a copy of encounter recordings from many agencies.
If COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that people gladly give up civil liberties when threatened. What Ellison describes and desires could come to pass. It already is in China and the UK. The government just needs the right leverage, such as a mass terror event, in order to make it happen.
Obligatory Bryan Cantrill quote: "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. "
Surveillance has expanded and seems set to continue, regardless of what one may or may not prefer.
It seems the important questions are whether such systems will define what is right or whether they will support the population in decentralized social decision making and synchronization the same way capitalism supports distributed allocation decisions.
that’s what i said. libertarian. thiel is in the same biz. the cattle have clearly and consistently expressed a preference for security over liberty, so might as well make a buck off it! not endorsing btw, just saying.
libertarian ideology seems rather counter to the existence of a police state. though many in favor of a corporatocracy seem to claim be libertarian as they look no deeper than low taxes and minimal regulation while ignoring the personal liberties for masses as that part isn't profitable for them.
since a lot of people here have adhd-tldr, i repeat: not an endorsement, but if you see “the writing on the wall” (i.e. the plebes flushing inalienable rights down the toilet for cash and prizes), and that we’re headed for a feudalism revival, it would take a martyr-like devotion to libertarian principles to abstain from the surveillance-state gold rush.
I would ask that you reconsider using "adhd" as a derogatory manner in your future posts, it is quite ostracizing for people with actual ADHD to encounter such language. ADHD does not mean "can't pay attention to something longer than a few words". Please at least educate yourself on the disorder before using it as an insult.
Additionally, you are using "libertarian" in an incorrect manner. A libertarian is someone who believes in minimal state intervention in personal affairs, which is at odds with a desire for total state surveillance.
takes one to know one; i have actual ADHD. having a doctor’s note does not alter the facts of the situation.
as for “libertarian”: principle vs practice. think of the Christians. local businessman has the Gospels on his lips, has the checkbook wide-open for the church, but when that secretary is looking sweet and juicy…
Having ADHD doesn't mean that you have a consequence-free pass to be insensitive with your words. It doesn't automatically grant you full understanding of the disorder, nor of the broader social implications of normalizing the use of "ADHD" as a slur. I again ask that you reconsider your language.
> as for “libertarian”: principle vs practice. think of the Christians
Are you claiming that Ellison is a private libertarian, or a public one? He has a clear history of backing GOP candidates, has not claimed to be libertarian, and so I am confused by what you mean. He neither preaches nor practices libertarianism, publicly or privately.
From a Randian perspective, he does practice it—publicly & privately. They all do. If you mean that he falls short of some ancap purity test, hate to break it to you, but that’s just their version of “that wasn’t true socialism”.
As for the ADHD sensitivity, deal with it. People who get so stuck on their diagnoses only do it because they aren’t performing. It’s very important to milk it for maximum victimhood, so that the next time the boss/customer/client gets pissed at him for not delivering the goods, he can sue them for discrimination against his “disability”, instead of getting fired for being a flake. I don’t care what people say about ADHD because I perform, and see that sort of play as an ignoble win.
You don't care until you yourself get hit with the shirt stick somewhere. It takes just a bad flu season, a tick bite, a vehicular accident and billion other things you don't and really can't control to mess someone for life, like yourself. And then you would be the one screaming for someone to care or help and not dump you in the dumpster.
Apparently lack of empathy is now a job requirement.
Using clinicalization, and ultimately lawfare, to force someone to pay me for work that I have either not performed, or have not performed to standard, is neither justice nor empathy; it is injustice, selfishness, & legalized theft. And I have been hit with the short stick before. That is what savings, family, & friends are for.
> And I have been hit with the short stick before. That is what savings, family, & friends are for.
It wasn't a very short stick. You had savings, family and friends to depend on. It's privileged to assume everyone has access to these three things, or that lack of access to them is their fault.
po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. you ask your fellows not to eat paint chips—gently, then forcefully, then begging, then pleading—yet they, almost unanimously, continue to snack on them. which viable options are even left at that point, outside of either eat the paint chips too, or abstain, but start selling them?
- ALL the focus is on asset allocation and ordinary people surveillance, nothing on who control AND OWN the controllers, or the "AI" mentioned;
- smartphones, mobile connectivity the key to make people pay the surveillance, obviously for the profit of the controller.
Instead of FTTH to focus on stable and high performance links to WFH focus on mobile surveillance, I'm curious why we IT workers do no agree a MASSIVE, WORLDWIDE STRIKE asking for mandatory WFH for all eligible jobs "we run the nervous system of the society, we build it, we will not be flesh-based bots of some manager in a smart-city lager", and focus on desktop computing instead of mobile, because here happen anything else.
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said
He's not even trying to frame it as "the weight of crime will be lifted from the people so they can prosper". It's "citizens will be on their best behavior". I've got a suspicion that he envisions a separate world for himself that does not involve such monitoring.
Mid-covid lockdown when the virus was still fresh Larry emailed the entire company letting us know he was moving permanently to his private hawaiian island in order to "make it a better place" with the locals.
It will still have that monitoring it will just be under his control with multiple layers of deletion possible depending on the severity of his crimes the cameras pick up (if there is a fire in his server room you can be pretty sure he raped or murdered someone). Atleast this is the silent part you are not supposed to say out loud that i picked up vibing from his comments.
If the goal of surveillance is behavior control, then invisible-to-camera status can become a commodity to be turned on/off based on evolving priorities, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41563571. A few years ago, there was news coverage of an invisible-to-surveillance list in China.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
(Nineteen Eighty Four)
Saved me looking up that exact quote, hahaha!
An excellent book. I spent the first part of my life thinking it mainly spoke to the past (we learned our lesson, right?), and that a Brave New World style future was more likely, but now I think it’s deeper than that. Totalitarianism shows up because of a flaw in the human psyche, and we need to be fucking CAREFUL.
I wonder how behavior is defined exactly. Will future societies track eye focus and build a profile over time attached to a facial recognition database? Inappropriate gazing
In Iran, AI powered facial recognition cameras are being rolled out to catch out any women who dare disobey their religious clothing rules. Once caught, these women often face severe abuses at the hands of the state.
The state in this case believes this is "good behaviour", but this would be shocking to most HN readers. This is a good example of why you should never give one person or organisation too much power.
Who gets to define what "Good behaviour" is?
I agree about one person or organisation too much power, and fear the potential for abuse, but the problem in the Iran example are the theocratic laws, not really the tools that help enforce them. Good behaviour is already defined by each nation's legislation.
some tools make it too easy to enforce bad laws at scale. it's a lot of work for the morality police to catch up to every woman who removes her hijab and cart her to jail. unless you're watching all the women all the time, they'll often get away with it. mass surveillance really takes a lot of the legwork out of running a repressive regime.
This has a broader purpoae in democracy. Laws change as people realize they are stupid and disobey them then opinion changes and the law catches up. The chance of being caughy and/or the punishment cant be too high to short circuit this for all but the most obviously bad crimes (ie murder, large scale theft, rape)
It is pretty much both. And these tools are ineffective for security anyway.
To be intentionally provocative, who are we as a morally bankrupt capitalist-imperialistic-colonialist-white-supremacist-nation-built-on-slavery to tell the noble and pious people-of-color of the Middle East what they can and cannot do with their culture?
People. We're people, and as such we get to make moral judgements. And it's obviously and pretty straightforwardly not okay to force women to cover themselves head to toe.
This particular example is not even difficult to deduct from some pretty basic axioms of morality, mainly that disadvantaging someone on the basis of their sex is wrong and that people should have personal freedom so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others.
When I read about the women who, just a few years ago were able to chat and laugh in public, wear whatever they want, go to school, college, work and are now beaten/jailed/stoned/murdered for these things?
I think this ‘provocative’ comment has forgotten the human element in this.
I believe that is his point. You (and most of us here) might think that this behavior is bad... But those people believe it is right. Who makes the decisions about what is right and what is wrong? There are Muslim women right now that march in Britain in the name of Sharia. Surely they should want more freedom and rights, and yet there they are, dressed in all black garb marching for their "oppressors"
They do so because they believe it is right.
> There are Muslim women right now that march in Britain in the name of Sharia
This gets so overblown especially by people who benefit from this idea being spread, while the truth is that the amount of people who actually do want Sharia is very low and the amount of people who are actually "marching" to get it implemented is even lower.
[dead]
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/12/the-watchers
Where do I sign that contract and how do I get you to collect on not meeting the terms, mr rich guy Zuboff?
Oracle sells to entities who want the processing capabilities and OLTP. Ellison is a dinosoar survivor of another era. Not every play he makes is awesome but he is a survivor. If he says this, there will be a reason behind it which goes to Oracle's bottom line.
Not the politics, not what he really thinks: A reason which matches a market opportunity he thinks Oracle can seize.
This. It reminds me of IBM pitching their services to Trump at the start of his first presidency.
Sounds pretty god-awful to me. But it's certainly worth considering that this capability will exist in the next 20-30 years, for better or worse.
Technology this powerful is the bedrock of a successful hypothetical totalitarian state, a big prerequisite. What do we do once it's within reach?
Cities like London and a lot of larger Chinese cities already have the majority of the city under continuous surveillance. It’s only a matter of feeding that data into an LLM. It’s already within reach.
No reason to think they’re not already doing it. Def not 20-30 years out.
The system Ellison describes is one where we know we're under surveillance at all times, so we behave. At the very least, that belief has yet to pervade Western society
We are the ones who would know because we are the ones who would build it. We would at least know that someone is working on it, what it would take to implement and how long it would take to set up.
Entire miniature cities are being erected for police training. Drones with recordings of babies crying are being used to lure and gun down people in israel.
Sources?
by israel*
Protect the first and second amendments.
You could argue the second amendment has gotten us here.
I couldn't. Go right ahead.
There is no doubt that this dystopian view deserves immediate condemnation, but that doesn't meant that there wasn't one possible good idea in there. Don't watch people, just watch the watchmen:
"Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person."
That will never happen. There’ve been any number of transparency rules that somehow never make it into production. Look how hard it is today to get a copy of encounter recordings from many agencies.
It’s already happening. Ai is being used today to review police cam footage. Not in real time but that’s also not a huge barrier.
Justice without mercy is cruelty.
Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.
- St. Thomas Acquinas
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
- W.H. Auden
It's a logical next step to what major cities are already doing for years now. I agree it will happen, not that it should be welcome.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
If COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that people gladly give up civil liberties when threatened. What Ellison describes and desires could come to pass. It already is in China and the UK. The government just needs the right leverage, such as a mass terror event, in order to make it happen.
I'm sure this view will last for as long as it doesn't affect Larry Ellison.
No wonder kids cover their faces now
Hey, can't be too careful -- COVID is still out there, right? Mask up, everybody!
star wars fashion incoming!
They'll probably switch to gait detection and identification. So 'sand walk' incoming.
Very curious how Larry thinks AI cameras would have prevented this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/technology/oracles-chief-...
Or is he only worried about the behavior of people who aren't billionaires?
>Under the terms of the settlement, Mr. Ellison would designate the charity
Say no more.
You know the answer as well as I do — “For my friends: everything; for my enemies: the law.”
Obligatory Bryan Cantrill quote: "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. "
I suspect the unspoken part is *of those who can't afford to pay the fines for bad behavior.
Let’s start with Larry’s office.
Don't worry, Oracle will sue anyone who buys it into oblivion, so it won't be a threat for long.
Why don't we start with some in his house and office?
This smells of 1984 idolatry.
How do we watch the stream from the camera in Larry Ellison's office?
perfect for a thought controlled society run by a despot
Surveillance has expanded and seems set to continue, regardless of what one may or may not prefer.
It seems the important questions are whether such systems will define what is right or whether they will support the population in decentralized social decision making and synchronization the same way capitalism supports distributed allocation decisions.
I suspect that Larry is a closet libertarian, and this is his accelerationist response.
i suspect his sudden love of big brother is that he plans to own the hardware its cloud runs on.
Kleptocrat
that’s what i said. libertarian. thiel is in the same biz. the cattle have clearly and consistently expressed a preference for security over liberty, so might as well make a buck off it! not endorsing btw, just saying.
libertarian ideology seems rather counter to the existence of a police state. though many in favor of a corporatocracy seem to claim be libertarian as they look no deeper than low taxes and minimal regulation while ignoring the personal liberties for masses as that part isn't profitable for them.
since a lot of people here have adhd-tldr, i repeat: not an endorsement, but if you see “the writing on the wall” (i.e. the plebes flushing inalienable rights down the toilet for cash and prizes), and that we’re headed for a feudalism revival, it would take a martyr-like devotion to libertarian principles to abstain from the surveillance-state gold rush.
I would ask that you reconsider using "adhd" as a derogatory manner in your future posts, it is quite ostracizing for people with actual ADHD to encounter such language. ADHD does not mean "can't pay attention to something longer than a few words". Please at least educate yourself on the disorder before using it as an insult.
Additionally, you are using "libertarian" in an incorrect manner. A libertarian is someone who believes in minimal state intervention in personal affairs, which is at odds with a desire for total state surveillance.
takes one to know one; i have actual ADHD. having a doctor’s note does not alter the facts of the situation.
as for “libertarian”: principle vs practice. think of the Christians. local businessman has the Gospels on his lips, has the checkbook wide-open for the church, but when that secretary is looking sweet and juicy…
Having ADHD doesn't mean that you have a consequence-free pass to be insensitive with your words. It doesn't automatically grant you full understanding of the disorder, nor of the broader social implications of normalizing the use of "ADHD" as a slur. I again ask that you reconsider your language.
> as for “libertarian”: principle vs practice. think of the Christians
Are you claiming that Ellison is a private libertarian, or a public one? He has a clear history of backing GOP candidates, has not claimed to be libertarian, and so I am confused by what you mean. He neither preaches nor practices libertarianism, publicly or privately.
From a Randian perspective, he does practice it—publicly & privately. They all do. If you mean that he falls short of some ancap purity test, hate to break it to you, but that’s just their version of “that wasn’t true socialism”.
As for the ADHD sensitivity, deal with it. People who get so stuck on their diagnoses only do it because they aren’t performing. It’s very important to milk it for maximum victimhood, so that the next time the boss/customer/client gets pissed at him for not delivering the goods, he can sue them for discrimination against his “disability”, instead of getting fired for being a flake. I don’t care what people say about ADHD because I perform, and see that sort of play as an ignoble win.
You don't care until you yourself get hit with the shirt stick somewhere. It takes just a bad flu season, a tick bite, a vehicular accident and billion other things you don't and really can't control to mess someone for life, like yourself. And then you would be the one screaming for someone to care or help and not dump you in the dumpster.
Apparently lack of empathy is now a job requirement.
Using clinicalization, and ultimately lawfare, to force someone to pay me for work that I have either not performed, or have not performed to standard, is neither justice nor empathy; it is injustice, selfishness, & legalized theft. And I have been hit with the short stick before. That is what savings, family, & friends are for.
> And I have been hit with the short stick before. That is what savings, family, & friends are for.
It wasn't a very short stick. You had savings, family and friends to depend on. It's privileged to assume everyone has access to these three things, or that lack of access to them is their fault.
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[flagged]
what your describing here isn't some demented form of pragmatic libertarianism, its nihilism.
po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. you ask your fellows not to eat paint chips—gently, then forcefully, then begging, then pleading—yet they, almost unanimously, continue to snack on them. which viable options are even left at that point, outside of either eat the paint chips too, or abstain, but start selling them?
Or could just be wishcasting a police state, which seems more likely.
there's not much of a difference. Just which end of the truncheon you think you're likely to be on.
Few notes:
- ALL the focus is on asset allocation and ordinary people surveillance, nothing on who control AND OWN the controllers, or the "AI" mentioned;
- smartphones, mobile connectivity the key to make people pay the surveillance, obviously for the profit of the controller.
Instead of FTTH to focus on stable and high performance links to WFH focus on mobile surveillance, I'm curious why we IT workers do no agree a MASSIVE, WORLDWIDE STRIKE asking for mandatory WFH for all eligible jobs "we run the nervous system of the society, we build it, we will not be flesh-based bots of some manager in a smart-city lager", and focus on desktop computing instead of mobile, because here happen anything else.
Looks like another rich asshole needs a guillotine delivered to their front door.
[flagged]
Reported for ageism.