Oracle Chairman looks forward to a time of total surveillance and AI policing

While Ellison’s hour and 15 minutes on stage was entirely Q&A, he consistently redirected incoming questions to talk up Oracle. While that’s understandable, if tedious, it was on the topic of artificial intelligence that his monologues were most expansive, out of an apparent desire to position Oracle at the centre of the AI boom, since large language models are, to some extent, massive databases.

“I feel like I’m living in a science fiction movie,” said Ellison. His first illustration of the wonders of AI was the medical industry, which he thinks Oracle can transform – even the NHS which he inevitably (and accurately) thinks is in need of a new database. “We’ll be training robots to be nurses… a variety of things in hospital but also nurses at home… They’ll be doing jobs that were formerly done by human beings,” he said.

Towards the end, having once more redirected an answer towards healthcare, Ellison took it upon himself to detail some other ways in which AI will be transformative to society. First he boasted of the ability to “absolutely lock down schools”, which he inferred will greatly reduce the likelihood of school shootings – an alarmingly frequent occurrence in the US. This facility would rely heavily on ‘AI cameras’.

He then moved on to talk about police body cameras, which Oracle sells and which are always connected to the Oracle cloud, such that users will apparently have to ask Oracle to turn them off when they’re going to the toilet. Even then they don’t turn it off, however, they just store the recording in case a court order demands it.

“So you get the privacy you requested, but a court order can still look at this so-called bathroom break,” said Ellison, the pitch being that this protects citizens from police misconduct. “The police will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on,” he added. “Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording and recording everything that’s going on.

“We’re using AI to monitor the video… Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem… We have drones… There’s no reason for high-speed chases between cars, you just have a drone follow the car… a new generation of autonomous drones.“

Ellison concluded by saying, in reference to AI applications “The world is going to be a better place as we exploit these opportunities and take advantage of this great technology.”

He clearly meant all this as a utopian vision, which his company will enable, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him how dystopian this seems to anyone who isn’t one of the richest people in the world. Ellison seems to only be capable of seeing the upside of a world of total surveillance, even when you think you’re safe from it, and in which AI is constantly passing judgment on your every action.

Perhaps he’s unaware of how much global concern there is about AI safety and the danger of placing insufficient guardrails around this immensely powerful technology. If Ellison is representative of the tech oligarchs that largely control AI (he spoke of a recent dinner he had with Elon Musk and Jensen Huang) then that concern seems, if anything insufficient.

You can watch the whole thing here.