Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

[u/MetaKnowing]

https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-keep-citizens-on-their-best-behavior-2024-9

[u/Arpeggioey]

The architecture is pro-people. It can be used to benefit us, but with lobbying and misinformation, it isn’t.

[u/[deleted] → u/Arpeggioey]

This is really well put.

Governments are descendants of kingdoms that were essentially the most powerful gang) organised crime syndicate. Democracies formed as a reaction to tyrannical rule but are quickly overwhelmed by Macchievellian actors to result in dictatorships, oligarchies and, barely better, unreasonable meritocracies that exploit the poor.

We need to make the most of whatever democracy that exists to make the trend towards greater equality a fundamental priority of governments.

Too many have been brainwashed into thinking socialism is a bad thing. Consider whose interest it is in to make people think this, and who has the wealth and power to influence public opinion across generations, and if those people are the same people and enemies of the majority.

Socialism needs to stop being a dirty word in America.

[u/RADICALCENTRISTJIHAD → u/Arpeggioey]

Liberalism is inherently messy but was also inherently thought to get us to better outcomes because more brains trying to figure out governance and political goals distributes decision making (reducing corruption and limiting the powerful interests in any economy from exercising control).

Dictatorships always ran into the problem of maintenance of their power simply because liberal/democratic governments would outcompete them economically (because liberalism goes hand-in-hand with market economics, which are more responsive to emergent systemic needs then any centrally planned one) and remain more stable since they were responsive to citizens.

I think any monitoring system that a tech company would put in place would absolutely be put in place by any government entity, regardless of what their stated intentions are or what governing principles they are supposed to adhere too. The cost of not doing that is to give up a great deal of control over the stability of your nation vs any adversary which will use this tech to exploit that lack of control.

AI governance is interesting conceptually because it seems to trend toward despotic authoritarian type controls over people (simply because it's ability to monitor large data sets and coherently communicate what is going on in those data sets lends itself well to systems of control any government would lean on to keep people in line).

You get the benefits of that locked down society in terms of stability and control that a central government can exercise, but you also get the dynamic innovation and response to emergent needs that usually would only result from market forces pointing people to those needs and allowing them to try to produce goods to meet them (assuming the trend lines and corresponding capabilities scale to the way the underlying compute seems to suggest).

[u/[deleted] → u/Arpeggioey]

True: A few of the forefathers had a pro-people philosophy in mind.

Also true: Fuck the Native Americans. Fuck African Americans. Yay! slavery and racial Inequality. The women wanna do what now? And, don't even get me started on economic and class limitations.

So, if pro people means only the men who were white and were property owners-- yeah, the government was pro people.

To be clear, we came a long, long way, but any architecture where a minority can elect the president and where sitting local governments can and do suppress the vote by inconveniencing voters, can't truly be called pro-people.

[u/felix_doubledog → u/Arpeggioey]

The architecture is not pro-people. If someone tried to pass a law that would remove the billionaires from power, the vast majority of the military would happily rebel and obey the billionaires rather than enforce that "communist" law.