"Super Vision"

Larry Ellison previews the dark side of AI acceleration.

The world's third-richest man, 80-year-old Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is back in the spotlight—and poised to play a big role in the Trump 2.0 era.

As AFP reports:

Unlike most tech leaders who distanced themselves from Trump in 2016, Ellison offered his early support. Today, he ranks among the world's wealthiest individuals, with a fortune of $230 billion, trailing only Musk and Bezos but ahead of Zuckerberg.

On Tuesday, Trump's first full day in office, Ellison made an unexpected White House appearance to unveil an AI infrastructure project alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son.

Ellison and Trump blindsided their buddy Musk by making Elon's arch-rival Sam Altman the poster boy for the next phase of AI accelerationism, with Trump calling him "by far the leading expert" in the field.

The petulant South African Nazi immediately had a hissy fit on X, where he claimed that the new Stargate venture didn't have the cash to deliver on all of Trump's extravagant promises (which, based on Trump's past history, would have seemed a reasonable thing to assert).

But then self-confessed video game cheat Musk also got a smackdown from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who personally vouched for $80 billion toward the project.

But back to Larry Ellison.

During Trump's January 21 AI hypefest, Ellison blabbered on about the healthcare benefits that artificial superintelligence could unlock.

In the process, he may have made RFK, Jr.'s head explode when he promised a personalized MRNA vaccine within 48 hours for anyone found with AI-detectable cancer cells in their bloodstream.

But Ellison's AI vision doesn't stop at healthcare.

In September 2024, during a Q&A session at the 2024 Oracle Financial Analyst Meeting in Austin, Texas, Ellison unveiled a fascistic vision for what Dan Gillmor called a "total surveillance society."

"Citizens will be on their best behavior" 

As summarized by @tsarnick on X, Ellison described how "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."

Ellison's comments came less than two months after Oracle paid $115 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that had accused the company of operating a "worldwide surveillance machine."

The suit alleged that, as of 2022, Oracle had created dossiers on more than 5 billion people worldwide. The dossiers included "names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity."

Paying $115 million to put that lawsuit in the rearview mirror was chump change to a company with $53 billion in annual revenue.

Clearly, Ellison—an aging broligarch personally worth more than $200 billion—has a passion for surveillance that goes beyond monetization.

After he "drooled" about AI's societal-control potential, Gillmor observed: "The fact that his company stands to profit immensely from such a thing is probably not his top motivation."

The road to digital totalitarianism

Perhaps it should be no surprise that America's sci-fi-inspired tech billionaires have found common ground with anti-science voters who reject mask-wearing.

Neither group like the government telling them what to do. And the power-hungry broligarchs are happy to encourage the anti-maskers to show their faces in the name of "freedom."

While bans on mask-wearing are nothing new in America, they have been increasingly used since before Covid to target progressive protesters.

Since Covid, much to the delight of Larry Ellison and the surveillance industry, Republicans have declared war on mask-wearing even for health reasons and many Democrats have been browbeaten into attacking masks in the name of stopping crime.

Writing for ArsTechnica, Benj Edwards noted that if Ellison has a hand in guiding the future of AI super vision, America will quickly be joining China on the "road to digital totalitarianism":

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.... 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. 

While Ellison went to great lengths to paint increased surveillance as good for everybody ("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"), in the Trump era that's complete nonsense.

Under Trump, the unacceptable will be normalized

In his first few days in office, Trump has already made clear that those who commit political violence on his behalf will get pardons, but everyone else is guilty until proven obedient.

And when it comes to immigration, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling wrote in New Republic, Trump believes, as he told Sean Hannity this week, you can "tell how much 'trouble' immigrants are going to be for the country based on the 'look' of them."

In Trump's America, new and ever-more-powerful surveillance technologies will be deployed to "secure the border" and to provide "public safety" in "crime-ridden" Blue cities even as they strip away personal liberty.

Before long, the government could also be keeping track or our health and our finances—and monitoring our personal relationships.

Once normalized, as migration and human rights expert Petra Molnar told the Tech Policy Press podcast in December 2024, surveillance tends to grow unchecked, turning a measure intended for security into a tool of social control.

Within the next few years, rapid advances in AI and increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies will make it easier than ever for a global coalition of rich white men to lock in our current economic imbalances and power structures.

As 2024 began, Sam Altman and others were speaking openly about the "catastrophic risks posed by increasingly powerful (AI) models."

Despite that, the Presidential election was fought without any serious discussion of the reality that, "the rapid, potentially exponential acceleration of AI capabilities could propel us into a future we're not ready for."

Now we have Trump. Emboldened but still dumb. A cognitively impaired psychopath with nothing to lose. The oligarchs have bought themselves a seat at the table. The crypto bros have cut him in on the scam.

Trump has no mandate to propel us into a tech future he doesn't understand— and a post-labor economy no one is ready for.

It's unacceptable that a few centibillionaires can hijack our democracy by showering the "weak and unfit" Trump with "flattery and favor."

But if there's one thing that we can be sure of under Trump: the unacceptable will be normalized.

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