Does Larry really lack enough self awareness to not realize these kind of statements make him sound like an orwellian super villain, or perhaps he does and simply does not care?
Larry doesn't care about anything other than Larry. For Larry, the biggest issue facing him beyond how he can live forever, is how he can ensure nobody ever commits a crime against him. The best way to ensure nobody ever commits a crime against him is to monitor every living human on the planet.
Any crime he commits can be figured out in courts with his high-priced lawyers so the idea that AI constantly watching you would be repressive seems misplaced to Larry.
For people that think I'm joking, at one point his primary philanthropic contributions were almost exclusively to life-extending efforts:
>Take the massive amount of money he once gave to life-extension research, which was the core focus of his philanthropic efforts.
>And so over the course of 15 years at the beginning of the 21st century he would donate over half of a billion dollars for anti-aging medical research, at a time when the field was seen as fringe science.
The point isn't about preventing people from commiting crimes against him. It is surely that oracle database would back the data centers run by the surveillance state.
Hmm, but has Larry considered that a scurry of squirrels may commit organized crime against his empire? Maybe he should invest in some deterrence there.
The trend has been more openness in this sort of behavior. After all, the public hasn’t seemed to respond to it with much negativity other than people occasionally complaining about these sorts of behaviors online. The highest level complaint seems to be public protest, which don’t seem to garner enough momentum to push change.
If there’s no repercussions, why not be transparent? Scary indeed, as it’s quite telling of the direction we’re headed in, IMHO.
If you're a billionaire today, you might be forgiven for thinking the current state of extreme wealth inequality is completely normal. You will obviously want to lock in a system that has benefited you and ensure that nothing ever changes.
Historically speaking though, wealth inequality in developed nations is reaching a point at which, as often as not, revolutions happen. Sometimes they're bloody. Sometimes not. There are two approaches to avoid a revolution:
1. Back off from controlling government and let reform happen gradually. Your wealth will be lessened, but you'll probably remain one of the richest people alive.
2. Lock everything in with a totalitarian panopticon state that you control. AI surveillance offers a huge advantage over surveillance networks used by past totalitarian regimes. e.g. East Germany's Stasi showed the limitations of surveillance in an age where humans had to do it themselves. With AI to do it, you can avoid employing a large portion of the population to watch the rest, and you can keep the power of that surveillance network concentrated in just a few hands, preferably yours.
It's clear which approach is being attempted in the U.S.. I'd just point out that #2 is inherently high-risk. If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle. If it breaks, the result could be a bloodbath. Approach #1 is much safer. Yet, here we are.
I do not believe Approach #1 has ever been attempted without quite a bit of blood leading up to its attempt, and I think it has only been attempted a few times even so, approach #2 - oppression, with resulting bloodiness - seems to be the norm.
One could argue that Solon the Lawgiver did #1 2600 years ago - abolishing debt slavery, supposedly abolishing most debts, freeing some public lands, coming up with council of Four Hundred.
Regime change when an occupying power leaves is a different scenario from changing underlying power structure of society where the controlling powers are in the society.
One reason for that is that when an occupying power leaves regime change must happen.
if you are a billionaire today, you are painfully aware that the wealth you have us on a timer, as human society burns through the resource windows and then decomplexifies and falls back into a sort of survival bootloop. What you buy with surveillance is tradeoffs of stability aka time. What you do with that time is to forward all vectors to escape the loop in some futures and prevent the loop from becoming hyper destructive due to gadgets from the golden times.
A panopticon thus exists in phases. first phase (centralized) to buy time, stabilize a complex society, then to help forward a gracefull decay, finally (decentalized) to prevent the decayed and loopstuck society from further self damage and keep complexity recover vectors open.
The dream is a Afghanistan with phones that can bootstrap itself out of the failed state.
> If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle.
well, not only the state, but how does capitalism survive that, who can buy anything (be a consumer) except for the essentials in that scenario, where do investments/growth go towards?
No offense but you're just injecting a trendy opinion without knowing anything about the man's history. Ellison was notorious even in the '90s-'00s and never made any real effort to hide it. The book "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" (yes, that's its actual title) came out all the way back in 2003, the title being a quip that had already been circulating for many years by that time.
Honestly I think I prefer openness, although I'll admit it's hard to be precise about what's ok and what isn't. In the spirit of free speech, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." At the same time, defending somebody's right to speech does _not_ mean that individuals can't embargo / "cancel" that person -- I think this behavior is itself speech of a sort.
What would you change about the present situation? I feel that public protest is roughly all that can be allowed in response to speech (ie, speech in response to speech). Surely he shouldn't be jailed/fined/doxxed for this speech? What more should be allowed? Or is it just that the public protest isn't as strong as you'd want?
Speech and thought are interlinked. Encouraging our society's most powerful to pander to social media in what they say undoubtedly affects how they think.
Sure but what’s the alternative? Are you going to decide what people can say? This is all very 1984, if you haven’t read it you might find it interesting
The thing that makes any given arrangement of society work (or not work) is how quickly/cheaply it removes decision-making power from people who demonstrate poor judgement.
This is a difficult task, because people with decision-making power tend use that power to alter the system to solidify their position.
Capitalism, at its finest, does this by letting people make bad decisions with their money until they haven't got any. This was an improvement on, say, holding wars until enough people decision-makers get killed off. However, a variety of long-term policy shifts have meant this no longer appears to happen - merely possessing capital is so profitable that even astonishingly poor decisions cannot reduce your wealth enough to matter.
IMO, through this statement Larry Ellison has demonstrated the kind of poor judgement which a functional society cannot tolerate in a decision-maker, and lacking an effective way to remove this from the decision-maker pool is the primary cause of societal trouble today.
Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?
Fwiw I agree with you in disliking the “eternal power“ dynamic that seems to come with being rich. I’d prefer to solve this by requiring more disclosure in lobbying efforts, restricting the kinds of donations you can make, etc. Money shouldn’t lead to political power IMO.
> Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?
I'm saying that a system in which someone with poor judgement manages to accrue his level of assets is broken somewhere.
Policy settings under which "having capital" allows you to grow your wealth while making terrible decisions are bad policy settings.
Various alternative policies exist, the most obvious of which is adjusting taxation settings such that growing your wealth requires consistently making good judgement calls.
I’m not trying to be obtuse, my best guess is that I’m in favor of what you’re proposing. Can you add more details though? I’m certainly in favor of progressive taxation, which kindof matches the spirit of what you’re saying by reducing the profit margin for those who have massive amounts to “play with”. Maybe there’s a more direct method though? Maybe a wealth tax? Something else?
> Does Larry really lack enough self awareness to not realize these kind of statements make him sound like an orwellian super villain
He's joining the attention economy. Saying something stupid but provocative yields earned social media. Larry Ellison saying something sensible wouldn't make HN's front page.
For one, he’s one of the OG’s who’s had vast wealth and power for longer than many others have been alive.
And two, he’s at an age where people lose any sense of self-awareness, shame, filters - all that shit.
Anyways I don’t think he cares that it makes him sound Orwellian. I suspect he’s fine with being Orwellian outright. Not having what he has is as unimaginable as for all of us having a fraction of what he has. It’s too much of a stretch for someone like that to extent so much to imagine.
And yeah it’s frightening, it’s why we did away with autocratic Sun King calibre aristocracy/royalty and all that. We can expect all the other zillionaires to follow this path reliably over the next few decades.
I doubt it’s the age of him, it moreso feels like the age of society.
With Musk swinging his arm to in the air to hail his führer it really feels like the defining moment of new age rich people, don’t get me wrong the build up was there but this is just the moment that best encapsulates it all.
The best person to personify the old age I’d say is Bill Gates, awful person behind the curtains I’m sure, real buddy buddy with Epstein but he did the whole “caring for humanity” shtick, he donated bits of his money, y’know he at least took some effort to make it seem like he cared.
> With Musk swinging his arm to in the air to hail his führer it really feels like the defining moment of new age rich people
We're five days into the Presidency. And Musk has stumbled across power the sorts he hasn't really had to wrangle with before. I'd be shocked if he comes out in 2028 better off, materially, than he is now.
Meaning power over the body (armed thugs, for example). Bit of a play on words.
Ma has power over the money, but Xi has power over Ma's body.
Rich people often think that money is everything (and they are usually correct), but there are some things that money can only buy, when facing a bat with nails driven through it.
Were those ties more business and philanthropic oriented or socially oriented?
I found this while searching for details surrounding the ties between the two:
The billionaire has acknowledged that he "shouldn't have had dinners with him" while his ex-wife Melinda French Gates said the business and technology magnate's relationship with Epstein played a role in their divorce.
However, the claim that Gates visited Epstein's private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands 37 times has not been substantiated.
I don’t mean age as in age of empires, I mean age as in old guy with no social filter anymore age.
Most people around 60-70 usually become quite shameless and cringey in one way or another.
As for Gates, he was dragged through anti-trust at a time when there were no other tech billionaires to team up with. His tech did not give him global reach - he just made a lot of money on office cubicle software back then.
But generally, yes. Absolutely - guy throwing salute is a defining moment of zillionaire IDGAF. Anti-trust success or failure is going to become the defining turning point for millennial generation.
Negative sixty eight years[1]. Oh, you didn't mean the private military contractors, of which there were about 250k involved in the iraq and afghanistan war, slightly more in total than deployed troops at any given time.
Many ultra-high-net-worth individuals hire them. It's no secret, they've been doing it since the 60s when kidnap and ransom insurance started being a serious thing, and it's only intensified over time. There was an interesting "bolt hole" real estate listing that claimed years supply of food, water, housing etc. for a "company sized group of security contractors" as an amenity.
The biggest problem is every creator of ceasing privileges from others genuinely believes that he is excluded.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
Any crime he commits can be figured out in courts with his high-priced lawyers so the idea that AI constantly watching you would be repressive seems misplaced to Larry.
For people that think I'm joking, at one point his primary philanthropic contributions were almost exclusively to life-extending efforts:
>Take the massive amount of money he once gave to life-extension research, which was the core focus of his philanthropic efforts.
>And so over the course of 15 years at the beginning of the 21st century he would donate over half of a billion dollars for anti-aging medical research, at a time when the field was seen as fringe science.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/24/21369773/larry-ellison-...