Billionaire #Larry #Ellison’s leap into farming with his company,
Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder:
'being smart in one arena doesn’t mean success in another'.

As the WSJ reports, the #Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island,
which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012.

Thirteen years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering.

Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robot harvesters feeding the world sustainably.

Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls and rookie mistakes
— like Wi-Fi issues and solar panels battered by Lanai’s winds.

Think greenhouses designed for Israel’s desert climate,
when Lāna‘i is typically muggy.

The company also mixed mature and baby plants together,
a blueprint for a pest paradise.

#Sensei, co-founded by a medical doctor and led currently by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reports the WSJ.

Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now appear at the island’s few local markets and restaurants.

But constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders,
including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt,
highlight a tough truth:

even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-ellisons-misadventures-in-farming/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky

Larry #Ellison wants to put all America's data, including #DNA, in one big #Oracle system for #AI to study - https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/larry_ellison_wants_all_data/ what could possibly go wrong?

The US government as co-owner of #TikTok. Because what could be better than a highly influential social media that is government owned?

Obviously with #Elon #Musk and Larry #Ellison as fellow overlords. Fun times.

#Larry #Ellison,
who briefly became the world's second-wealthiest person last week when his net worth surpassed #Jeff #Bezos' for a short time,
outlined a scenario where AI models would analyze footage from security cameras, police body cams, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams.

"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said,

describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.

"We're going to have supervision," he continued.

"...if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person."

Ellison's vision bears more than a passing resemblance to the cautionary world portrayed in #George #Orwell's prescient novel 1984.

In Orwell's fiction, the totalitarian government of Oceania uses ubiquitous "telescreens" to monitor citizens constantly,
creating a society where privacy no longer exists and independent thought becomes nearly impossible.

But Orwell's famous phrase
"Big Brother is watching you"
would take on new meaning in Ellison's tech-driven scenario, where AI systems, rather than human watchers, would serve as the ever-vigilant eyes of authority.

Once considered a sci-fi trope, automated systems are already becoming a reality:
Similar automated CCTV surveillance systems have already been trialed in #London Underground and at the 2024 #Olympics.

#China has been using automated systems (including AI) to surveil its citizens for years.

In 2022, Reuters reported that Chinese firms had developed AI software to sort data collected on residents using a network of surveillance cameras deployed across cities
-- and rural areas as part of China's "#sharp #eyes" campaign from 2015 to 2020.

This "one person, one file" technology reportedly organizes collected data on individual Chinese citizens,
leading to what The Economic Times called a "road to digital totalitarianism."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/

Flights at one of the Ukrainian airports - "#Lviv" or "#Boryspil" - will resume by the end of January 2025, Marsh McLennan senior partner Crispin #Ellison said at the 10th Kyiv International Economic Forum (KIEF) in #Kyiv on Thursday.

"I think if we're lucky, in January (2025 - IF-U) we'll have five or six airlines that want to fly (from #Ukraine - IF-U)," Ellison said.

https://interfax.com.ua/news/general/1025830.html

Omnipresent AI cameras
will ensure good behavior, says #Larry #Ellison

"We’re going to have supervision," says billionaire Oracle co-founder Ellison
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/

Oracle’s Larry Ellison joined Nov. 2020 call about contesting Trump’s loss

#Larry #Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company #Oracle -- and the biggest backer of #Elon #Musk’s attempted #Twitter #takeover --

️participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant.

The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. #Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean #Hannity; Jay #Sekulow, an attorney for Donald Trump; and James #Bopp Jr., an attorney for "True the Vote", a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed #claims of widespread #voter #fraud.


Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss,
an effort still coming into focus months later.

It is the first known example of a "technology industry titan"
joining
powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law
to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options
and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/20/larry-ellison-oracle-trump-election-challenges/