One of the few things that the Trump 2.0 administration and Keir Starmer government have in common is the amount of influence Ellison seems to wield over them.
The world’s fourth richest man, Larry Ellison, has a vision for the future, and it is one that most of us would never vote for if given the chance (which, of course, we won’t be). It essentially involves harvesting and storing all of a nation’s data, including all of its citizens’ most personal data, in one place, and then letting AI programs scour all over it. That data, he says, should include economic data, electronic healthcare records, including our genomic data, spatial information, agricultural data and info about infrastructure.
“I have to tell [the] AI model as much about my country as I can,” Ellison said in a recent onstage discussion with his old friend Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit. “We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like. That’s the missing link.”
Here’s a video of the full exchange between Ellison and his obsequious servant.
Ellison believes that the benefits of such a system will include improved healthcare, thanks to treatments tailored to individuals, as well as the ability for governments to increase food production by better predicting crop yields. And at the World Governments Summit he was touting those benefits to senior representatives of many of the world’s governments, with Blair by his side helping to lubricate the sales pitch.
The octogenarian tech titan has an almost religious faith in AI, describing it as “maybe” the most important discovery in the entire history of humankind — more important, seemingly, than fire, the wheel, language, steam, electricity and the atom. He is also aggressively pushing for governments, particularly the US and the UK, to embrace AI-enabled control and surveillance technologies, with a significant onus on biometric identifiers — something both countries have already been doing for some time, with help from Ellison.
In fact, Oracle, the company Ellison co-founded in 1977 of which he is still chief technology officer, has been so busy harvesting the online data of the world’s citizens that in 2022 it faced a class action suit in California over its worldwide surveillance machine. According to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), one of the three class representatives, Oracle has claimed to have amassed detailed dossiers on 5 billion people — more than half of the planet’s population:
Oracle’s dossiers about people include 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: [4] for example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site.[5]
The class action suit was eventually settled in 2024 after Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to the more than 3.2 million people who had submitted claims. The eligible class members received around $25 each, while lawyers for the plaintiffs walked away with $28 million in fees.
A World Without Passwords and PINs
Now, Ellison wants to take AI-enabled digital surveillance and control systems to a new level by totally centralising them, despite the obvious security implications. He also envisions a world without passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs) in which access to IT systems and tech platforms will be based purely on our biometric identifiers. As he says in the clip below of his recent chat with Blair, “this is the last year you will ever log onto an Oracle system with a password… biometric logins are the future.”
Tony Blair: How important is Digital Public Infrastructure [Digital ID, Fast Payments, Data Sharing]?
Larry Ellison: Biometric logins are the future. No more passwords. Keep the data in the country.
World Governments Summit, #WGS25 #WorldGovSummit https://t.co/OSWTWvEjM6 pic.twitter.com/eH0A4bXX06— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) February 12, 2025
Ellison also talks about the need for national governments to have their own “sovereign” data centres to power their AI systems, which will no doubt provide Oracle, the world’s largest database management company, lots of new income streams.
In an Oracle financial analysts meeting in September, Ellison told investors that AI will usher in a new era of surveillance that he said, gleefully. will ensure “citizens will be on their best behaviour.” It is almost as if Ellison read Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World and came away with a new business model. From Business Insider:
Ellison said AI would be used in the future to constantly watch and analyze vast surveillance systems, like security cameras, police body cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboard cameras.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “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.”
Ellison also expects AI drones to replace police cars in high-speed chases. “You just have a drone follow the car,” Ellison said. “It’s very simple in the age of autonomous drones.” He did not say if those drones would broadcast the chases on network news.
Ellison’s company, Oracle, like almost every company these days, is aggressively pursuing opportunities in the AI industry. It already has several projects in the works, including one in partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Like his friend and business associate Elon Musk, Ellison has taken up a prominent place within the new Trump administration, with the two-term president describing him as a “sort of CEO of everything,… an amazing man.” Unlike most Silicon Valley CEOs including Musk, Ellison was on board with the MAGA project during Trump’s first term. On Trump’s first full day back in office last month, Ellison was there to unveil “Stargate”, the administration’s $500 billion bet on AI infrastructure alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison said. “We’ve been working with OpenAI for awhile. The data centers are actually under construction, the first of them are under construction in Texas… Each building is half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations.”
Like Peter Thiel, a fellow Trump supporter who helped enable JD Vance’s rapid rise to the vice presidency, Ellison owes a large part of his success to a simple business model: spinning off a sprawling CIA tech project into a giant private-sector business. This part of his success story is often ignored or played down by mainstream media. In September last year, Gizmodo pilloried Vox for publishing an entire in-depth article about Oracle and its founder without “even once” mentioning the CIA:
Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was Oracle’s first customer.
Vox simply says that Oracle was founded in “the late 1970s” and “sells a line of software products that help large and medium-sized companies manage their operations.” All of which is true! But as the article continues, it somehow ignores the fact that Oracle has always been a significant player in the national security industry. And that its founder would not have made his billions without helping to build the tools of our modern surveillance state.
“Recognizing the potential demand for a commercial database product, [Ellison] founded the company that became Oracle in 1977,” Vox writes, conspicuously omitting the whole “because CIA wanted a relational database” part of the history.
Which isn’t to say that Oracle’s work with the US government should necessarily be frowned upon. The CIA needs databases, just like any large organization. But not mentioning just how reliant Oracle has been on government contracts since its inception is downright strange and seems to feed this narrative that Ellison simply created a product that companies wanted and private enterprise did the rest.
Straddling Two Governments
Today, Ellison is determined to turn his dystopian vision of the future into reality through his deep connections with two markedly different governments: Donald Trump’s second administration in the US and Kier Starmer’s Labour government in the UK.
In the US, not only will Ellison be spearheading the Trump administration’s AI agenda; his company, Oracle, is among the potential buyers of the Chinese social media giant Tik Tok’s US operations. And Oracle has an important head-start over many of its rivals: during Trump’s first term, it played a pivotal role in negotiations over stripping TikTok from its Chinese ownership, in the process becoming a trusted provider of the company’s data storage in the United States, a role it continues to play to this day.
In the UK, Ellison wields arguably even more political influence than in the US. As we have reported before, and as the Daily Mail (of all places) confirmed this past weekend, that influence is largely thanks to Ellison’s close ties with former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Those ties date all the way back to Blair’s time in Downing Street when, as The Register reports, Oracle become a significant supplier of technology to the government”:
In fact, Oracle still runs more than half of the UK central government’s financial and planning software, including the Department for Work & Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Cabinet Office, Home Office, HM Treasury, and Ministry of Defence.
The Home Office migrated to Oracle during Blair’s tenure as prime minister. In 2006, a damning NAO said the department’s inability to deliver its accounts on time were down to a problem with the system. Once a fix was implemented, it led to an adjustment of the bank account and creditor balances by £67 million ($85 million), according to Parliamentary records.
Ellison is also far and away the largest backer of Blair’s modestly named foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI). From the Daily Mail piece:
The Ellison foundation bankrolled Sir Tony’s not-for-profit institute, known as TBI, with £43million in 2023 and £36million in 2022. Newly-released figures show it has set aside £178million more for TBI ‘to support effective governance work in Africa’.
Such largesse has helped TBI balloon in size. Founded in 2017, it now employs more than 800 people across 40 countries, with some executives earning as much as £540,000 a year, although Sir Tony does not take a salary.
This month, six months after Sir Tony’s jaunt on Ellison’s yacht, the pair were reunited at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Appearing via a video link, with the image of Ellison’s face dwarfing Sir Tony as he sat on stage, the pair discussed artificial intelligence, with Ellison declaring that AI is a ‘much bigger deal’ than the invention of electricity or the Industrial Revolution.
As the Daily Mail article notes, Blair’s “bromance” with Ellison has “sparked accusations of a ‘conflict of interest’ as Sir Tony urges the Government to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and digital health records: two technological revolutions worth millions to Ellison’s empire.” Make that billions.
The money river from Ellison to TBI appears to be flowing faster than ever, as Aaron Bastani points out in the interview below:
Tony Blair wants the NHS to sell patient data.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and world’s 5th wealthiest person, has given over $100 million to the Tony Blair Institute.
Oracle wants to be a world leader in digital health data.
Follow the money. pic.twitter.com/LmXnp8qkFE
— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) January 26, 2024
As we predicted in May last year, Blair appears to be wielding significant influence over the Starmer government’s operations. Many of the key positions are occupied by members of the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which has spent the past four years purging the party of its genuine left-wing politicians and members, including former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach.
Former and even current employees and board members of TBI feature prominently. As the US journalist Robert Kuttner wrote before last year’s election, Starmer “has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair” and TBI. That includes its AI agenda, with TBI insiders such as Patrick Vallance, the Tory government’s chief scientific adviser during the first three years of COVID-19 pandemic, Jeegar Kakkad and Kirsty Innes helping to shape the government’s tech policy.
Just four days ago, the FT reported, with a hint of irony, that Starmer has been warning his cabinet about the dangers of Blairism… while at the same time bringing in more and more New Labour era staff:
The prime minister wrote a memo to his cabinet saying that the public are “hungry for change and disruption”.
In the letter, seen by the Financial Times, he repudiates ideas associated with Blairism, including the concept that “globalisation held all the answers”, an alleged “complacency” about the role of the market, and the idea that immigration is “an untrammelled good”…
Yet… the scale of the Blair revival is striking. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, is now Starmer’s national security adviser, while Liz Lloyd, deputy chief of staff in Downing Street from 2005-07, oversees domestic policy in Number 10.
Meanwhile, Lord Peter Mandelson, architect of Blair’s election triumphs, has the top diplomatic role of UK ambassador to the US, while Claire Reynolds, Starmer’s political director, smoothed party relations for Blair.
Douglas Alexander, the trade minister who prepped Blair for prime minister’s questions, was this month given a new Cabinet Office role, where he joins the influential Pat McFadden, Blair’s former political secretary.
As his influence expands on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems likely that Larry Ellison will get much of what he wants. He already has a $500 billion commitment from Trump to build a vast network of data centres across the US, many of which will be managed by Oracle. Meanwhile, the Starmer government has pledged to “turbocharge” AI across the UK. The proposed Data Use and Access Bill, which is speeding through parliament, will be instrumental in making this happen by, among other things, relaxing the use of automated decision making technologies.
A few months ago, we asked just how dystopian Kier Starmer’s Britain could become. The best answer, it seems, is: “how long is a piece of string?” Since coming to power just eight months ago, the Starmer government has:
- Ordered Apple to provide legal “back door” access to its devices, which would allow UK intelligence agencies to spy on British users. In response, Apple has removed its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system, which encrypts user files uploaded to the cloud, from its iPhone systems in the UK. Interestingly, Forbes ran a piece yesterday claiming that the FBI is seeking much the same thing stateside: “lawful” access to any encrypted data.
- Announced plans to launch a digital identity system later this year. Veteran cards for former military personnel will be the first documents supported, followed by a pilot for mobile driver’s licenses (just as in the US). The government is also considering introducing a digital Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) that will “allow” voters to use digital versions of identification documents stored in the Gov.uk wallet at the polling stations. But as we’ve been warning for the past three years, privacy groups in the UK are claiming that the Gov.uk app could lead to a mandatory digital ID scheme.
- Unveiled plans to further expand the use of live facial recognition technology, on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force;
- Called for the creation of digital health passports for NHS patients, prompting a backlash over concerns about digital privacy and the possible sale of patient data to third-party companies — a policy that Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague lobbied for just before the elections.
- Resurrected old Tory plans to grant inspectors at the Department of Work and Pensions increased powers to snoop on claimants’ bank accounts. Big Brother Watch warned that the increased powers could be used to spy on not only the accounts of pensioners and welfare claimants but ALL bank accounts. It was one of 18 NGOs and charities that signed a letter to the government warning that “imposing suspicionless algorithmic surveillance on the entire public has the makings of a Horizon-style scandal – with vulnerable people most likely to bear the brunt when these systems go wrong.”
- Announced plans to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2025, carrying on Rishi Sunak’s controversial Digital Pound plans, with a “blueprint” expected by Christmas. As we reported last week, the proposal is not just opposed by most members of the British public, according to one of the few public surveys conducted on the matter, but also prominent figures within the City of London.
- Launched a crackdown on lawful speech. After the riots in the summer, the Home Office is planning new non-crime “hate” measures. Again, this was a policy that was eventually dropped by the Tories, out of fears it would curtail free speech, but is now being resurrected by Starmer’s Labour Party.
The Starmer government’s latest dangerous idea is to relax UK property laws in order to eliminate obstacles for “innovators”. Put simply, the government wants to give Silicon Valley tech companies, including presumably Oracle, free reign to feast on the intellectual property of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, publishers, poets, documentary makers, authors, scriptwriters and anyone else who produces original creative works, including the 2.4 million people who depend on it to make a living.
The one silver lining is that by doing so, the government has enraged some very powerful, vocal and influential people, including Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John who pointed out that the move jeopardises the UK’s entire music industry. Perhaps, just perhaps, this budding backlash will bring much-needed public attention to the wider picture here. This isn’t just about the future of the UK’s music industry; it’s about the future of basic freedoms and rights in one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies.
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This is all I had to read about Larry to know what he is about. He thinks wants AI be some sort of God, and he thinks this is possible if you give it enough data.
You see, to make the prefect decision, you need to have all the data possible. And I mean all the data. But in reality, only a God can have all the data, only a God can be all knowing. No human can ever have all the data. So Larry and these AI priests think that AI can have all the data, but it cannot either. And by all the data I mean it has to know where each molecule in the universe is, and it even need to know things it cannot possibly know right now. I guess this is what they are all calling the singularity?
I will say, give AI enough data and it will realize making a perfect decision is impossible and hopefully just stop everything it is doing and start praying to a real God.
How can you tell if someone is praying to a “real God”, and not one of the myriad of non-real ones?
There’s a recurrent theme among those like Ellison, Kalanick, Musk, and others…
Ellison left U Chicago before finishing his degree in Physics and Mathematics there.
Kalanick dropped out of UCLA before finishing his Computer Engineering degree.
Elon Musk did finish his degrees in Economics and Physics at UPenn, but is questionable as to what his affiliation with Stanford University was afterwards.
The thing is, CompSci-100 level classes, much like Econ-100 classes, are enough to make you useful and dangerous in those respective fields. From 1980 to even as recent as 2015 by my own estimates, knowing the syntax of more than one programming language, basic data structures, and advanced computer literacy (how to use a terminal program or interact with one to manipulate files and data on a computer) made you immediately hireable. If you had the resources to start you own business/consultancy, then one to two years of that education made you able to identify workplace process issues in data entry/record-keeping and start deploying solutions immediately. No degree or credential required.
The problem though, is as soon as you take CompSci-200 and 300 level classes, one’s view of what computers can accomplish (should) become humbling. Turing’s proof that the halting problem is unsolvable (There will never exist a program running on a Turing machine, e.g. computer, that can universally solve whether another computer program will complete execution or hang/loop forever, because it is impossible to construct one) informs one that not even God can predict what the outcome of an infinite universe is.
The ones who will be gods won’t be the AI, they will be the people at these corporations and the governments who control the data. The entire AI project as currently envisioned is the exact opposite of most people’s concept of freedom.
Speed running towards the Butlerian Jihad. We’re not going to have calculators on the other end.
We can use the poles upon which the heads of tech oligarchs are impaled as an abacus.
Two days ago I got a demand from my accountant for a digital (scan or bring in originals if you don’t trust email) version of my passport/driving licence plus a proof of address (utility bill or bank statement/HMRC letter). WHY?
These guys have been dealing with me for years. They know at present due to health/caring issues I have only a (trivial) income from a textbook. Yet they are concentrating on people like me to pick on with stupid checks.
We know the accountant wouldn’t be demanding this unless HMRC was demanding it. We’ve gone from a household where only one of the three of us voted Labour (not me) to one where not a single person will vote that way at the next general election thanks to other shenanigans. Congratulations Sir Keir on further destroying the Labour vote in north Nottingham! (Hope this isn’t considered a repost; I posted a longer comment which included a reference to this issue in last few days but Skynet ate it. As per recommendations I waited and I’ve done advanced search to double check it didn’t just appear 24-48 hours later).
Ellison basically wants all the information of each country in one huge database. And I would not be surprised to learn that his would include people’s personal files on their computers as well. Silicon valley has already proven that they will suck up everything as when they were copying the internet as training data for their AIs. Of course this would be a huge honeypot and you wonder how many hackers and criminal gangs will seek access to it. But all this brings up a thought. Must has had his doggy bois running through agencies such as Social Security as well as other sensitive databases as well and they have had read-write access to all those files. So could it be that one major aim of this was to install back-doors so all that personal and private information could be copied and sucked out to go to some of Ellison’s servers? For a database of a nation, that sort of information would be foundational in setting up a framework for that database.
You’re thinking too small Rev. Ellison, (Yet Again Dangerous Visions?) is thinking globally. No more nations, just one integral Master Control Program.
Silicon Valley really is aiming for the long dreaded New World Order.
So are they going to push aside Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum and do their own version? Will it too come with a side-order of bugs?
The Silicon Valley Gang considers all others as “lesser beings” whether organic or ‘artificial.’
There is a delicious irony in observing that the old tyme Oracle at Delphi has been found to have been “inspired” by mephitic vapours arising from the depths. The Oracle proper would inhale the vapours and hallucinate, this giving rise to the equivocal prognostications for which the institution was famous. AI has been shown to have a propensity to ‘hallucinate’ itself. Thus, are its pronouncements also to be considered as enigmas to be interpreted?
AI is a classic example of the old computing dictum; Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Seeing how the AI system itself rests upon a Leap of Faith for its legitimacy, would it be any surprise to find later that dissent from that Faith will result in Inquisitions and Autos da Fe?
Stay safe. Avoid participating in as many databases as you can.
Very difficult. My resolve is tested daily.
“AI is a classic example of the old computing dictum; Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
For their customers it becomes Garbage In, Gospel Out.
I get a sense that Ellison, like other Silicon Valley bros, read a lot of science fictionh, especially the works of Philip K. Dick. But while the rest of us were reading PKD’s works as cautionary tales, he was was reading blueprints.
We won’t need no bugs tho, the Soylent Green will be made out of people!. (sorry, that joke may have got worn out already)
“But that joke isn’t funny anymore, it’s too close to home,
too near the bone…”
Love your New Wave SF reference.
I am thankful that I was somewhat ahead of the curve when it came to cloud-sharing file facilities. When the NHS in the UK was only just getting around to demanding password-protected PCs/files, I was already using encrypted lockers containing all the datasets I’d collected.
The issue I encountered – and which feeds into the “cloud storage” issue elsewhere on this site discussed in last day or so – is that the best encryption methods typically had maximum “useability” if you used a small number of larger sized lockers. To ensure unencrypted files were not stored in the cloud facility when syncing across your PCs, you had to do things like remember to close a locker at end of your session so it updated itself fully (re)encrypted, make sure it fully uploaded and only then close down your PC. Depending on your network connection speed, this could be a real hassle.
Since then I decided cloud sync services are too dangerous and too much of a pain. The most important personal data stays on an airgapped PC to try (probably vainly) to keep info out of the grubby hands of people like Ellison.
I’m thinking along the lines of an airgapped PC at high noon at the bottom of a well.
I ‘enable’ no WiFi systems in our house. (The ‘wifi’ systems from the neighbours is another matter. I can “view” five or six on any given day.) I’m wondering at the feasibility of creating a “Farraday Room” for ‘sensitive’ data file storage.
Stay safe.
We only use Ethernet at home – the only time Wi-Fi is on when my wife wants to download podcasts to her phone or if we have a guest.?Wi-Fi is inherently unsecure. I’m starting to get nuts about the privacy stuff. We refuse to have “smart”appliances and drive an older car.
If you set up DD-WRT firmware on your router (presuming your router is supported) then you can set up the wifi to have WAN (internet) access only, no LAN access.
Without guardrails, AI will kill liberty, freedom and those who oppose it.
Larry Ellison is not just your run-of-the-mill oligarch, but a Zionist oligarch. As such, and with the world’s information at his and MOSAD’s finger tips, can anyone not see the possibility of the equivalent of explosive pagers not harming anyone who opposes, say.. more Palestinian genocide? Absolute control of the US government?
Real time, we are seeing the role US Jewish lobby is having in UK politics already (thanks to oligarchs like Bloomberg, Schwartzman, Larry Fink, et al with presence in London), starting with the cleansing of the left in the Labor Party, suppression of news about the Gaza Genocide, attempting to suppress pro Palestinian demonstrations
Digital identity, and reduced verification, synchronization of ID between institutions, etc., was going to happen with or without AI, to my mind isn’t really connected. Governments and banks had already been doing this without AI and I don’t really see what AI can do here which regular databases can’t already do.
However, and perhaps this is a bit of a tangent. Just as a though experiment, let’s propose that an overcoming of capitalism might be achieved if all standing stores and warehouses now offer their goods at no cost – to each according to need, from each according to ability. To sustain such, you’d need some form of considerable centralized logistics system in place, a way of prioritizing resources, delivering them when and where they’re needed. Amazon, DHL, UPS, FedEX, all have an infrastructure now in place. A worldwide centralized sytem has potential to be that apolitical distribution of resources, which might make this possible, right?
So is such really a dystopia?
Could such be a path to communism/socialism? It’s hard to ignore that a working system might have addressed the resource distribution gaps which led to the fall of Soviet Russia. And that any system of government/economy WILL fail if it can’t feed the people.
If I recall, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress the central computer joins the anarchist revolution voluntarily, having calculated that the existing system, if continued, would lead to humanity’s collapse. I’ve gotta read that book again…
you know it seems to me that’s just a lot of energy demand, doubt it will be sustainable. It makes sense if I assume that a chosen few are preparing for a future with far fewer humans, but even then, a couple of inbred generations and that’s it.
I liked the idea where they all went off on a boat. That’s what we should be going for, let’s encourage that one.
I thought the people of the world were getting somewhere when the oligarchs and such were getting their own private islands. They could do what they wanted there. Organize society like they wanted on their little islands. Have the islands run out?
I miss the days when business was about people picking a product or service and then going home to live in peace. Not disturbed by the business until they needed something else.
“It makes sense if I assume that a chosen few are preparing for a future with far fewer humans”
A point I’ve also often made about the “futurism” plans thrown around.
Speaking of future, I hear that Soylent Green futures will be all the rage soon.
It is not widely understood that Ellison’s success was based on his understanding that corporations would pay a high premium for database software that was marketed intensively. Oracle’s elite, high-paid, and brutally motivated sales force succeeded in getting clients to pay substantially more than the cost of roughly equivalent competing products. Most of the superior features of the Oracle database were seldom used, but the buyers took comfort in having the “best.” It was the corporate IT equivalent of wanting a Rolex watch to tell time. Ellison went to great lengths puffing up the reputation of Oracle and narrowly survived an accounting scandal in 1991 about cooking the books on software sales. The huge profitability of database sales allowed expansion into other sectors, which led to the accumulation of Ellison’s billions. His foray’s into AI are just more of the ruthless aggrandizement that have characterized his business career.
There’s a pretty good 2003 book that covers these things, ‘The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison[0]’, Mike Wilson.
[0] – God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison
It’s a worthwhile read, and I think the title joke is funny.
“This will be the last year you’ll log into an Oracle system with a password”.
Will the millions of people who work for organizations that use Oracle products have a say in this? Or will they have to choose between having their employment terminated or feeding the hungry maw of AI with their precious biometric data? Larry clearly has a surveillance normative view of the world and is a type of snooping big brother figure wearing an innovator’s suit. Not to worry though, all of this is being done to “advance humanity” as the high priests of high technology keep reminding us.
I have been using Oracle’s accounting program for over two years now. It’s not so hot at accounting, including an AI component that doesn’t work but that Oracle’s customers have the privilege of paying to “train” . It sure does hoover up a ton of data though, and it produces metadata out the wazoo.
Working with this dreck has already shortened the time I expect to be at this job. Fighting with janky tech to get my work done isn’t how I’d prefer to spend my time, and my patience is just about gone. The day I’m required to login with biometrics will definitely be my last day.
I infer from this that either you’ve either never been an Oracle customer before or were asking a rhetorical question.
Yes. This is how a healthy society develops good behavior.
Off leash manners are the only manners that matter.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who is going to keep an eye on these machines, and the “great men” that own them? This will be the main problem, because I can’t trust any of these man as far as I can throw them.
I used to think DOGE was really about two things:
1) Eliminating the government’s oversight and enforcement mechanisms
2) Selling off the public’s resources to for-profit corporations for them to rent back to us.
For #2 I was naively thinking in terms of physical assets like national parks, but this article makes it clear that #2 also covers all the government data about its’ citizens that the DOGE bros’ AI models need.
Too bad for them that it’s going to be a garbage in garbage out situation, since the average American mind is already so polluted with their dreck.
“I have to tell [the] AI model as much about my country as I can,” Ellison said in a recent onstage discussion with his old friend Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit. “We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.”
Why? At this point we all know that the answer will be ‘42’.
I take it the key phrase is: “put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model…” for as he utters the phrase “put it into a database” dollar signs ring up in Larry’s eyes, just like the infamous Daffy Duck meme GIF.
…a giant Oracle database, that is, AI-ready and with licensing fees to match.
I’d say that the ‘promises’ of benefits in some areas are unlikely to ever materialise. Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) is still true and some of the data stored is garbage.
Medical records might be the obvious example where healthcare providers might prefer to put in data that enables them to maximise billing over putting in data that some might believe to be more accurate. Another example might be that even if every attempt is done to put in correct data then the one collecting it might not have the skill to properly diagnose and/or to listen to patients.
And then there might be some concerns about the software supplied by Oracle:
https://telecareaware.com/is-oracle-healths-big-vision-smacking-into-the-wall-of-healthcare-reality-their-business-says-so/
& while the article above claims some success in Sweden this this article might indicate something else (in Swedish, I am not a fan of linking to translated versions):
https://computersweden.se/article/3832518/millennium-fortsatt-pausat-efter-avtal-med-oracle.html
& here is a link about some claimed failures in UK & US:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/27/oracle_cerner_project/
The GIGO issue is very much real, but it’s unlikely to matter. Just look at typical results from the AdTech world, where this consumer tracking idea originated.
The adtech marketers (the vendors, not the advertisers) promise the ability to ‘slice and dice’ the audience to the nth degree, so you can show your ad to exactly your optimum target consumer. There is *some* validity to this idea. For *some* markets it works very well. One top of mind example is free trial mobile game downloads. Obviously, your target consumer is someone who already is playing a mobile game. Note that this requires almost no personal behavior tracking, just age (to filter out minors who can’t spend money) and whether that phone has downloaded a game, preferably recently.
For most other products, it barely works at all. The adtech people talk a good line about measuring this and tuning that, but in the end, most of the results are statistical noise. Doesn’t matter. The people spending the money have been convinced this is the future of marketing and are all in. The people at the decision making level do not have the expertise, training or interest in validating the data. The people who do understand the data, well, their jobs depend on doing more of the same. The more you try to educate the marketing people about statistical significance, the more their eyes glaze over and get annoyed that you’re getting in the way of implementing their quarterly marketing plan.
Now picture what will likely happen when some future “AI” system is sold to health systems or municipalities for predicting health outcomes or minimizing property crimes or whatever. Are the people in authority making the purchasing decision going to dive in and verify that the underlying data is any good? No. They’re going to be sold this magical system, and then they’ll be invested in the results of the system.
Will it suffer from GIGO? Yes. So? It’s snake oil, and people want to buy snake oil.
“The people at the decision making level do not have the expertise, training or interest in validating the data. The people who do understand the data, well, their jobs depend on doing more of the same. The more you try to educate the marketing people about statistical significance, the more their eyes glaze over and get annoyed that you’re getting in the way of implementing their quarterly marketing plan.”
“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Famous quote. I just grabbed the first article about that quote that popped up, from 2019:
https://www.mediavillage.com/article/which-half-of-my-advertising-is-wasted-and-it-is-only-half/
And it has some bad news for advertising:
“…Researchers Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart tackled the myth directly in 2006, publishing their book What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds. After examining more than $1 billion of marketing spend for one million consumers by 30 major corporations, they discovered that the marketing spend in question had an overall effectiveness rate of no more than 37 percent.
If marketers said “63 percent of my adverting spend is wasted,” this would not have quite the same ring as John Wanamaker’s 50 percent phrase, but it would be more accurate. Briggs and Stuart figured out why nearly two-thirds of marketing expenditures were wasted, concluding that the waste came from a poor understanding of consumer motivations, coupled with inaccurate messaging delivered with an inappropriate media mix. Bingo. Target missed.
This is worse than the flip of a coin. Getting consumer motivations wrong is a serious problem. So is inaccurate messaging. So is an inappropriate media mix. If this is the best that marketing can do, it’s a sad commentary on the professionalism of its marketing practitioners.
The Briggs and Stuart results were from 2006, roughly in line with when marketers pivoted to deal with the challenges of digital and social marketing. Digital and social challenges added complexity and may have distracted marketers from correcting the underlying consumer, messaging, and media mix mistakes that Briggs and Stuart identified. Digital and social adds fraud to waste levels. Recent analyses show fraud levels of 23 percent for social display ads and 31 percent for news video ads on iPhones. Fraud levels increase waste levels above the original 63 percent level Briggs and Stuart calculated…”
FFS…
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
“Citizens” not being people named larry ellison, I’m sure…whose best behavior will be whatever he (“we”? who exactly is that?) feels it to be…
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” That’s what we call freedom!
“You think you’ve private lives? Think NOTHING of the kind!
There is no true escape, I’m watching all the time…”
Do these ivory-tower, power-drunk oligarchs even hear themselves? Did they ever read any dystopia novels back in the day? The oligarchy has no clothes.
Initially, the panopticon will be used to blackmail political opponents into the desired courses of action, and selective prosecution as selected by humans. To prosecute all detected crime will require robot judicial proceedings to handle the sheer volume.
Tony Blair and Larry Ellison, what a pair. Oligarchs and war criminals make a great team. Sociopaths of a feather…
Why do silly humans allow relatively few people to accumulate obscene and perverse levels of power and influence? We are so sophisticated with our wonderful “technology” yet can’t organize ourselves in a reasonable fashion. The ironies never cease.
What about HIPPA and medical records privacy in the US? We can trust the high priests of the temples of AI to safeguard our records
And now the US won’t need to create a comprehensive, modern health care system after all, the magic of AI will make healthcare available to all
Musical interlude (1982)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
Not sure if this is pertinent to the discussion here but there’s this.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
Waiting for the Carrington Event…