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"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"The development of autonomous military systems - dubbed "killer robots" by campaigners opposed to them - is deeply contentious. Earlier this year, Google withdrew from the Pentagon's Project Maven, which uses machine learning to analyse video feeds from drones, after ethical objections from the tech giant's staff. The government insists it "does not possess fully autonomous weapons and has no intention of developing them". But, since 2015, the UK has declined to support proposals put forward at the UN to ban them. Now, using government data, Freedom of Information requests and open-source information, a year-long investigation reveals that the MoD and defence contractors are funding dozens of artificial intelligence programmes for use in conflict."

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads - more than all his opponents combined."

"We have become symbiotic with these machines. We feed them with energy and data, and they reward us with a host of services. But our relationship with them goes deeper. There are multiple layers of feedback loops as we shape algorithms and they shape us, at the individual and collective levels. What framework can we turn to to analyze this complex ecosystem?"

""It literally is at a point now we've created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is literally where we are. I would encourage all of you how to internalize this is - if you feed the beast, the beast will destroy you.""

"School officials see the cameras as a way to improve student confidence and crowdsource the task of catching misbehaving pupils. Parents use the feeds to monitor their children's academic progress and spy on their friendships and romances. But many students see live-streaming as an intrusion, prompting a broader debate in China about privacy, educational ethics and the perils of helicopter parenting."