One sentence spoken during last year’s company event Oracle continues to cause a backlash across the tech industry. Now it’s back in the spotlight after TechRadar pointed out its potentially far-reaching consequences.
„Citizens will behave as best as possible because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that happens“.
He made this statement Larry Ellisonco-founder and president of Oracle, talking about the possibilities that artificial intelligence could bring to surveillance and security systems.
Although Ellison presented his vision as a way to reduce crime, increase safety and make society more efficient, critics warn that such a view opens the door to a scenario that resembles dystopian science fiction more than a desirable future.
The essence of Ellison’s idea is based on the assumption that advanced AI systems, connected to vast networks of cameras and sensors, could monitor almost all activities in public space. Artificial intelligence would then automatically analyze the collected data, identify suspicious behavior and report incidents without the need for human intervention.
This kind of technology is no longer just a theoretical concept. In recent years, AI systems for facial recognition, video analysis and real-time data processing have become significantly more advanced. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI are investing billions of dollars in developing systems that can understand and analyze the world through cameras, microphones and other sensors.
However, this is where the biggest controversy begins.
Privacy advocates warn that there is a huge difference between using AI systems for specific security tasks and creating a society where every move, conversation or activity is potentially recorded and analyzed.
In such an environment, citizens no longer change their behavior because they respect the law or social norms, but because they assume that they are constantly under surveillance.
It’s a concept that social scientists have been calling the “panopticon effect” for decades, after the idea of a prison where inmates never know if anyone is watching them, so they act as if they’re under constant surveillance.
Ellison’s statement comes at a time when the technology industry is at a turning point. Generative artificial intelligence has garnered the most public attention over the past few years, but many experts believe that so-called “physical AI” could have an even greater impact on everyday life.
Unlike chatbots and image generators, physical AI implies systems that can observe the real world, make decisions and react to events in real time. Such technologies are already used in smart cities, autonomous vehicles, industrial plants and security systems.
The question that is now becoming increasingly important is not whether such a level of surveillance is technically possible, but who will control the data, how it will be used and where the boundaries will be set.
The history of technological development shows that tools developed for legitimate security purposes often gain much wider application over time. Facial recognition systems, for example, were originally presented as a way to identify criminals and missing persons, only to be later used for commercial user tracking, customer behavior analysis, and other purposes that were not part of the original promises.
Because of this, Ellison’s words caused strong reactions among organizations that deal with digital rights and privacy protection. Critics warn that the idea of a society in which “everything is recorded and reported” implies the concentration of a huge amount of power in the hands of governments, corporations or institutions that manage such infrastructure.
On the other hand, supporters of advanced security systems claim that citizens already today voluntarily share huge amounts of data via smartphones, social networks and connected devices, and that intelligent surveillance systems could contribute to a safer society.
This is precisely why the debate is not only technological, but also political, legal and social.
Today, artificial intelligence enables the analysis of amounts of data that were unimaginable just a few years ago. As these possibilities grow, the issue of privacy is likely to become one of the most important issues of the digital society.
And regardless of whether Ellison’s statement was intended as an optimistic vision or a warning, it managed to draw attention to a dilemma that almost every modern state will face: how much security do we want to get and how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice in return, he concludes TechRadar.