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Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

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Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#71

Post by EastLondonCoder »

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?

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#72

Post by toephu2 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #31
bpodgursky wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. La…

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 ?

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?

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#73

Post by lenerdenator »

speak_plainly wrote: post #22

To be charitable to Ellison, it worked well in China.

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.

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#74

Post by ffsm8 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #18

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

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#75

Post by yogthos »

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.

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#77

Post by prerok »

twoodfin wrote: post #6

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 wi…

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

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#79

Post by colordrops »

ekianjo wrote: post #10
hootz wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

#80

Post by bodge5000 »

thot_experiment wrote: post #54
an0malous wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)
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