Beyond Real Time: Cn U C me now?

(Image credit: @ManufacturingIntellect/YouTube)

Look at this pix. Ellison, 40 years younger, seeming to answer a question as the emergent leader of the new surveillance state, driven by databases connected to Palantir, the CIA and NSA, among significant.others, as needs warrant. BRT has commented on surveillance for years but this is different. This is becoming official policy as tech is now connected in ways thought impossible to achieve until today.

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording

and reporting everything that is going on."— Larry Ellison, September 2024

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

This world that Ellison describes revolves around AI technologies processing huge amounts of video footage from the explosion of cameras in the streets, cars, front doors, and even police officers. AI will, he added, automatically report issues that it detects while it's analyzing footage captured in real time.

With so much opportunity to scan and detect wrongdoing across society, and AI reducing the processing and decision-making burden, Ellison posited that citizens will, in kind, respond by adjusting their behavior. This vision is eerily similar to that George Orwell described in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother oversaw the daily actions of citizens.

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Wrangling with an AI-fueled dystopia

The movement against AI playing a role in surveillance is vast, with plenty of commentary and research identifying ways this is happening. There are, for example, concerns over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitoring social media with AI used to scan and summarize findings.

Other reports suggest that big companies are engaging in workplace surveillance. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, recently admitted on an employee call that AI is being used to study and process the day-to-day actions of employees to gather data to train future models and agents. It comes shortly after reports that the company will track clicks and keystrokes on devices.

Whether in the workplace — or society at large — the direction of travel for the last couple of decades has favored increased monitoring and surveillance, with Ellison clearly concerned that emerging technologies will simply add more fuel to this fire.

He's right. Think the French Revolution as example No. 1.