Billionaire Wants To Use AI To Make Orwell's "1984" A Reality
Billionaire Wants To Use AI To Make Orwell's "1984" A Reality
He said it with a straight face too…
Ever read George Orwell’s brilliant masterpiece “1984” and thought, “This sounds like a great idea!”? If you have more than two working brain cells, probably not. The infamous book depicted the horrors of a technology-enabled surveillance police state. Civilians are monitored 24/7 and arrested if found to be breaking the law. With such an enormous overreach of power, the government has become oppressive to the nth degree and is willing to “vaporise” people for even the mildest of criticism. Well, it seems Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the IT giant Oracle, thinks this sounds like a great idea. In fact, he wants to use AI to make “1984” a reality and turn the US into a surveillance state, with him, unsurprisingly, reaping the profits.
Ellison first declared this dystopian ambition during a publicly broadcast Oracle meeting. He stated that AI is on the verge of ushering in a new era of mass surveillance and that Oracle is ready to serve as the technological backbone for such an application. Ellison excitedly envisioned a world of constant real-time AI monitoring for everyone. The idea is that the AI would monitor our every action to identify and report crimes, ensuring everyone is subject to mandatory accountability and, in Ellison’s words, keep everyone “on their best behaviour.”
Ellison described a scenario where police are equipped with bodycams that can’t be turned off, allowing Oracle’s AI system to keep round-the-clock tabs on them. As such, Ellison stated this would mean “the police will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on” and claimed that “if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem to the appropriate person.”
But Ellison also claimed that “citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” He didn’t detail how this omnipresent AI would constantly monitor its citizens, but because Oracle started as a CIA project and has ties to the NSA, and we all walk around with an internet-enabled high-grade camera and microphone on our person 24/7, I’m sure this won’t be a problem.
Needless to say, this idea is laughably shit.
For one, constant monitoring and reporting of police behaviour isn’t going to change their behaviour. After all, who is this AI going to inform of police crimes? The police… This is why one of the most significant problems with police forces around the world is that they trend towards institutional corruption and protecting their own, enabling those in higher ranks to get away with heinous crimes even if reported. For example, current government data shows that half of police killings in the US aren’t investigated! As such, this AI tool isn’t likely to change police behaviour all that much.
What’s more, the police force in the US isn’t well known for being highly trained, using appropriate force, or being infallibly professional. As a result, it’s safe to say that flooding them with countless crime reports from this omnipresent AI could lead to some seriously dangerous situations.
This problem is compounded by the fact that AI isn’t 100% accurate. It hallucinates falsehoods, and even the best AIs fail to recognise basic patterns at an alarming rate. Consequently, this AI could “SWAT” (if you don’t know what swatting is, read here) people quite regularly by claiming the person has committed an egregious crime they simply didn’t commit. Just as a reminder, over 22 people have been killed by police SWAT teams since 2015!
Needless to say, this, combined with how inaccurate AI can be at predicting and reading human behaviour, will cause immense stress in the general population, even if they are law-abiding citizens.
And there is one final horrific flaw to this plan. US democracy is far from safe. It has been misled and manipulated by lobbyists for well over a century, and authoritarian and anti-democracy figures have been able to gain profound influence over the government almost since its founding. It also has a history of violating its citizens’ privacy and rights for the sake of the state’s safety, as seen in the Patriot Act. These factors, combined with the wave of modern extreme-right political movements that have managed to retain a strong foothold in US politics, make giving the US government such a tyrannical amount of power against US citizens a slippery slope to Orwell’s predicted nightmare where even “thoughtcrimes” could be dealt the heaviest punishments.
Let’s also not forget that just because an act is illegal doesn’t mean it is morally wrong. Western governments have a history of criminalising movements that hold them to account. As such, protests against unjust or illegal wars or climate protestors trying to fight for a better future are often heavily and unjustly criminalised by the state. That is, despite the fact that movements like theirs are the main driving force of our cultural evolution and why we have liberty our ancestors could only dream of. Ellison’s despotic AI could stifle this critical cultural evolution.
But, even if Ellison somehow found a way to mitigate all of these flaws, this still isn’t actually solving the problem of crime in the US. Many studies have found that most crime stems from adverse social, economic, cultural, and familial conditions. In other words, most of the crime in the US is created by institutional racism, classism, a practically defunct welfare state, and our post-capitalist economy. To break that down even further, most people commit crimes in the US because they have to, not because they want to. No matter how hard you penalise these people for their crimes, they have functionally no alternative and so will carry on. So, if you want crime to go down, make these people’s lives better and give them other options through improvements to welfare, job initiatives, affordable housing, social programs for all ages, and healthcare. It’s really not that hard.
Unfortunately, many billionaires and extreme right-wingers can’t accept this, as it goes against their notion of us versus them, that they are part of a group that is inherently and indisputably “better.” It also goes against their values of ultra-individualism and forces them to partake in the care of society.
But I don’t think Ellison is proposing this horrific future for political reasons. No, I think it is simply for cold, hard cash. You see, in the same way that the only way to make money from the gold rush was to sell shovels, Oracle is one of the few companies actually profiting from the AI boom. Almost every major AI company uses Oracle’s data centres. But even the largest AIs we have today won’t require as much infrastructure as Ellison’s proposed ‘Big Brother’ AI. As such, this AI-driven police surveillance state, based on his infrastructure, could be the most lucrative deal Ellison and Oracle can ever land. It seems Ellison wants to take that deal, no matter how sour it will be for the likes of you and me.
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Sources: The Register, Futurism, BI, PC, Fortinet