Billionaire Larry Ellison Warns: Be Careful Of 'Relationships With A Piece Of Software'
Megan is the producer of the "American Hustle" and "Her," two current films wracking up awards.
Ellison, 69, is the CEO of tech company Oracle, a tech visionary who has been running Oracle since he co-founded it in 1977. He's also known as a wild playboy who's been divorced four times.
The event was held to promote company's human resources cloud software. But in the Q&A session, he invited the audience to ask him "anything."
One man asked Ellison what he thought about the role of tech in our modern lives. Ellison said he was "disturbed" by how much time kids play video games, and what that could lead to. Here's what he said:
My daughter produced a movie called "Her." It's about this guy that gets divorced and is having a rough time finding a relationship until he meets this piece of software ... it's an artificially intelligent bot, that takes no physical form.
That's one way it can go. You can say that's utterly ridiculous. But I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing video games. They've chosen a virtual self.
This weird thing where NFL says 60 minutes a day you should go outside? I know I was a kid a long time ago, but if the sun rose, I was outside on my bike and if my parents were lucky, I would be home before dark.
The fact that people have chosen games where there's a virtual ball rather than a real ball ... that's because [games are] easy. It's very hard for me to be LeBron [James]. I was pretty good at basketball, I'm still not bad, but I'm not LeBron. Now everyone gets to be LeBron in virtual reality. But in reality only one guy gets to be LeBron.
I won't tell you how the movie ends, but it's amazing: Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software, that are gradually getting smarter than you are.
The truth is, the future that Ellison describes is already here. Virtual girlfriend apps are all the rage in Japan right now.