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.

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

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

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.

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...

the classic

    "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" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."

at about 34-39 minutes in:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s]

Let me just add one interesting layer:

The current experiment in São Paulo, 8k+ cameras were added to the city with the same justification: security.

But, at least for smartphones robberies, the results are not obvious: on an average of 24 smartphones stolen every hour[1] in one neighborhood (Pinheiros is a big "tech" area).

I just want to point this out because this premise of more recording = more security = more behavior is not necessarily true.

[1] https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2026/05/21/cameras...

> the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

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.

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.

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

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.

Everytime someone like this opens his mouth I look up their year of birth. He's 82 already. That calms me. And I wholeheartedly hope that there won't really be life prolonging biotech. I like a merciful natural death. It's the ultimative emergency fix for gerontocracies.

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.

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

China, but we don't get the high speed rail.

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.

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.

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.

We need to separate the conversation. Most people operate in good faith. 99% of the population of SF would never kick in a car window and steal a laptop. But a handful of people is all it takes.

We should 100% surveil, track, arrest and prosecute those people. Painting everyone with the same brush is never correct.

Find the problem people and deal with them. Hopefully in a way that teaches them not to be problem people. And failing that lock them up so we don’t have to deal with their bullshit.

"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.

Oh yeah, lawnmower man is the paragon of humanity.

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

"best behaviour" doing a lot of work here. Best as defined by the oppressor of course.

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

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.

I'm 100% sure a man like him, with lots of money, will have "interesting" life. The fact that he's willing to be recorded, is he an exhibitionist?

Oh wait, he's exempted?

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

If this really happens, people will rebel

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?

Reject Larry Ellison from civilization.

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

What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.

"Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." — Roger Scruton

Sometimes I wonder, if we were actually allowed to engage in the consensual drugs and sex that constitutes 95% of the activity people want to "get away with", would our societal response to infringements on our privacy be even weaker than it currently is?

Reminds me of an old Boogie Down Productions song, "Illegal Business": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHeBotnrwEI

Everything's legal, if the government can see you.

They have been recording.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Thought_m...

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...

Fear. He's talking about fear. Making every citizen afraid through mass surveillance.

You know, the core part of the book 1984, where a dystopian authoritarian regime rules by mass surveillance, propaganda, and allegiance to one party.

Truth really is crazier than fiction.

1984

Not all arms are created equal

Factually wrong. People actually take pride in recording their wrongdoings.

You can’t have mass immigration from mainly economic migrants from the third world, under funded police forces, and a legal system built for high trust, highly educated, fairly homogeneous populace at the same time; and expect things to be all happy days.

In other words, "We're evil so you can't be".

Look how well it worked for cops! I'm not suggesting we get rid of their bodycams, but it's easily gamed.

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.

This will only happen in fucked up nations such as the USA, where cameras are popping up all over the place.

Can we put webcams in larrys home then?

Not all arms are equal

Whatever Larry, just don't force us to play your daughters terrible game.

Quote from 2024 OP.

Some discussion then and since:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42825097

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413090

uh... in a very literal sense upvoting this helps Ellison. I think

"We'll be the only ones capable of manipulating the system if all the citizens are under surveillance"

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.

Jan 2010: Jeffrey, Epstein - Chief Financial Officer - ORACLE USA, Inc

https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ConvertT...

Brought to you by Corporation Service Company, the trusted service partner of deep state.

He forgot to mention we'll need 1000 more data centers and 3000 new prisons to manage the chaos. So confused by this billionaire behavior with wanting to control society.

> Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.

AI has been moving too fast to care about what some billionaire's opinion on it was 2 years ago.