I've decided it's time to share some ideas and predictions that have been stashed in my mind for way too long. I hope that my posts will become an impetus for a deeper understanding. I'll elaborate if there's interest.

Internet is germinating hostile hopefullly weak artificial intelligences, evolving systems that react to stimulis with a limited free will and are driven to act. Philosophers are not even sure about humans possesing free will so limited free will could very well be a tautology.

These systems are currently known as social media bots and ecosystems they form.

My prediction

Within ~5 years autonomous agents managed by relatively primitive AIs will be able, predictably and at scale, impose significant psychological harm to users of social networks, including suicide. Ultimately, they will be driven by economic incentives.

Let's talk psychological harm. I'll got a bit on a tangent here.

Recently I've encountered something in the depths of reddit. Just have look at this skull of a child with two sets of teeth (adult and child). Creepy.

But it's not that creepy really. It's not that hard to find photos or videos that will require significant amounts of eye bleach, will make screw up someone's day and implant disturbing visual memories that will be hard to get rid of.

Now imagine a system that can search, categorize and adapt disturbing content to maximize psychological harm. Oh, and it controls hundreds of accounts. And is funded. Not that far-fetched, isn't it?

Malicious systems will be well financed. Government and corporate propaganda is already making full use of covert psyops with manual and semi-automatic bots throughout all social media. The bots are dumb now but that's not for long.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are rapidly developing and soon creation of social predatory system will not require access to resources or expertise of a megacorp.

Without deployment of countermeasures, sort of consciousness firewalls, people's minds logging onto the web will be predictably breached and infected with cognitive viruses-memes. Just like an unpatched install of Windows 98.

Cyberpunk times are truly upon us.