Larry Ellison, co-founder and former CEO of Oracle, has a vision for the future. One of the richest people on planet Earth, Ellison recently shared this vision during a company financial meeting, according to a report from Business Insider.
Ellison outlined a scenario where AI models would connect with security cameras, police body cams, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams to create a surveillance state that George Orwell could never have imagined.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits of automated oversight from AI.
"We're going to have supervision," he continued. "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."
I get the feeling that Ellison will not be part of this surveillance state. He and most other rich people will be able to avoid it.
Oracle's Larry Ellison says a surveillance system of police body cams, cameras on cars and autonomous drones, all monitored by AI, will constantly record and report on police and citizens, leading everyone to be on their best behavior pic.twitter.com/RAq5XGaNmZ
— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) September 15, 2024
No more high-speed chases, says Ellison. "You just have a drone follow the car," Ellison said. "It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
Are the hairs on the back of your head standing on end as well?
While Ellison attempted to paint his prediction of universal public surveillance in a positive light, his remarks raise significant questions about privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for abuse in a world of ubiquitous AI monitoring.
Ellison's vision bears more than a passing resemblance to the cautionary world portrayed in George Orwell's prescient novel 1984. In Orwell's fiction, the totalitarian government of Oceania uses ubiquitous "telescreens" to monitor citizens constantly, creating a society where privacy no longer exists and independent thought becomes nearly impossible.
But Orwell's famous phrase "Big Brother is watching you" would take on new meaning in Ellison's tech-driven scenario, where AI systems, rather than human watchers, would serve as the ever-vigilant eyes of authority. Once considered a sci-fi trope, automated systems are already becoming a reality: Similar automated CCTV surveillance systems have already been trialed in London Underground and at the 2024 Olympics.
AI is turning out to be a boon for citizen surveillance. Reuters is reporting on China's fascinating, innovative, and incredibly intrusive AI surveillance system. The software is known as "one person, one file," which improves on the current system that simply collected the data and left it to humans to collate and sort.
“The system has the ability to learn independently and can optimize the accuracy of file creation as the amount of data increases. (Faces that are) partially blocked, masked, or wearing glasses, and low-resolution portraits can also be archived relatively accurately,” according to a tender published in July by the public security department of Henan, China’s third-largest province.
So we've got that to look forward to.
Another limitation of current surveillance software is its inability to connect an individual’s personal details to a real-time location except at security checkpoints such as those in airports, according to Jeffrey Ding, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
One person, one file "is a way of sorting information that makes it easier to track individuals," said Mareike Ohlberg, a Berlin-based senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Many people accepted street cams because of their promise as tools of law enforcement. The opposition to this kind of surveillance will be ten times what it was for street cams. It may not even be constitutional, depending on where the data is stored and who has access to it.
Will Americans sacrifice more of their liberty in exchange for a little more security?
