Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of database behemoth Oracle, more and more resembles a villain out of a science fiction movie. Recently, Ellison showed up at a global conference where he encouraged the governments of the world to fork over all of their data to the AI industry, claiming this would be beneficial to countries in the long run.
Bloomberg reports on Ellison’s appearance at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he was interviewed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ellison apparently encouraged the world leaders in attendance to “unify” their national data and feed it to AI models, so as to make AI stronger. Bloomberg writes:
Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models, Ellison said…Countries with rich population data sets, such as the UK and United Arab Emirates, could cut costs and improve public services, particularly health care, with this approach, Ellison said.
How convenient, then, that Ellison happens to own a database company that is also currently attempting to scale up its AI business. Interesting how that works! “We can provide high-quality services, save the government vast amounts of money, our populations will be healthier and the government will be spending less for better outcomes,” Ellison told the crowd.
The vision of the future that Ellison paints is fairly disturbing and feels not all too dissimilar from the “Rehoboam” plot line from the 3rd season of Westworld. Ellison wants to create a smoother, more efficient world, one where the technocratic corporate state and the governments of the world are joined at the hip by a constant flow of population data.
Take note, too, that at one of Oracle’s corporate get-togethers last September, Ellison also said he foresaw the rise of a new AI-fueled surveillance state, wherein robotics and automated systems could monitor entire populations and keep them in line. Specifically, he said the following: “We’re going to have supervision…Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” This is the cheery future he wants to create.
During the same event, Ellison gave an example of how AI and robotics would, in the years to come, allow governments to increase control over their populations. He cited high-speed car chases as an example: “You just have a drone follow the car,” he said, apparently dispensing with the need for human police officers. “It’s very simple in the age of autonomous drones.”
What if people don’t want to behave, Larry? What if people want to let loose every once in a while? What then? I guess that’s where the killer robot armies will come in.
You may not like what Ellison has to say but, increasingly, it doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do about it. The new Trump administration has made it known that it’s going all-in on the AI industry and that it wants to build out America’s AI businesses to make them the most dominant ones in the world. Ellison’s Oracle was recently announced as a member of the Stargate project, a new AI infrastructure effort that seeks to build AI data centers all across the U.S. Other participating members include OpenAI, Microsoft, SoftBank, NVIDIA, and other powerful tech companies.
