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"Some of the same social media analyses that have helped Google and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spot warning signs of a flu outbreak could be used to detect the rumblings of violent conflict before it begins, scholars said in a paper released this week. Kenyan officials used essentially this system to track hate speech on Facebook, blogs and Twitter in advance of that nation's 2013 presidential election, which brought Uhuru Kenyatta to power."

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"Luckily for the kid, it was only a single tweet. Had several students gotten together to form a study group, they might have been prosecuted for felony interference with a business model and gotten the death penalty. Do you suppose Pearson has hidden microphones set up around the schools so they can also listen in and see if students discuss the tests during lunch? I ask because that is basically the offline version of the student's infraction."

"On the contrary, building large centralized databases and predictive algorithms that make decisions on behalf of humans, and which completely ignore privacy concerns, now seem to be the most efficient way of governing. Algorithms now handle college admissions processes, applicants' selection processes for jobs, where to go to college, what to study in that college, which city is best for you to start your career and raise a family, what part of that city you should live in, and even who you should marry."

"The turning point happened in 2005, when the transistors, while continuing to double in numbers, were neither faster nor more energy-efficient at the same rates as before."

""If these systems aren't used to create propaganda and misinformation yet, I don't know what certain governments are doing with their time," ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine said. "We're letting the engineering get ahead of the science. We're building a thing that we literally don't understand.""