“We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something–be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us.

We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices.

While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.”

–from “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” by Yuval Noah Harari, October 2018, The Atlantic