6 June 2017 - machine fiasco 4

Advertising, like other fake news, is of course only one way to influence public opinion, an age-old human preoccupation that Machiavelli understood. Most information now arrives electronically, and already people cannot be sure whether all their internet “friends” are human beings. Russian information campaigns are a watery taste of what is to come. As machines shade into Turing Test territory, public opinion will be controlled by the faction with the greatest bandwidth.