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?
The other thing that comes to mind here is Brazil, the movie directed by Terry Gilliam - the inefficiency of the state is part of what makes it evil because it mostly doesn't care if it gets stuff wrong - I wonder how machine intelligence may change that.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi...
Bezos' recent CNBC interview was enough of a kick in the nuts to finally get me to migrate off of AWS last weekend.
Because the fundamental building block of society (which we are losing rapidly) is some amount of care for your fellow person.
Your comment is a great example of how we Prisoner's Dilemma'ed ourselves into a world of isolation and decaying institutions.
The surveillance tech that is much more likely to be deployed in the US and that few are talking about is Israeli tech used to spy on and suppress the self determination of Palestinians. Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.
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.
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.
There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
Does it? Japan is also famously clean, so maybe it’s the ethnic homogeneity? On the other hand, Singapore is very heterogeneous and clean, and eastern Kentucky is very homogenous and run-down. So maybe this whole attributing outcomes of society to singular factors isn’t very founded in science or reason but just gives people an opportunity to confirm whatever biases they have.
Clean streets and high speed rail are not a bundled deal with the panopticon - there is no causative linkage. Surveillance - as Ellison plainly mentioned - is for controlling anti-establishment behaviors.
They bought a country for pocket change.
Jeff will be president within 20 years imo.
It could be worse, it could be Musk.
Having seen what Americans will vote for, either option is possible.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
Pretty sure he is on his best behavior all the time.
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.
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...
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
Oh wait, he's exempted?
Everything's legal, if the government can see you.
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...
AI has been moving too fast to care about what some billionaire's opinion on it was 2 years ago.
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.
From what I've seen it goes both ways with bodycam footage. The cops often have to put up with seriously dangerous stupid people and cops on power trips are video'd abusing people. Not that I am defending Ellison. Sadly the rich will always be able to buy their way out of most any bad situation except screwing over richer people.
Some discussion then and since:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750