Time for extrapolation, brain storming, and irrational views of the future. I remember some years ago reading that many of those social media quizes like "Whic

Time for extrapolation, brain storming, and irrational views of the future. I remember some years ago reading that many of those social media quizes like "Which [random TV show] character are you" or "if you were a color, what color would you be" are run by companies that are slowly aggregating consumer behavior and background data on everybody. With access to this database, and a semi-intelligent bot that's been given instructions, one could build an collection of people who meet certain criteria. You could filter people down to determine who is most easily influenced by peers and have the bot befriend them and act as a peer. This power could be used to simply influence them to have certain consumer behaviors, or it could be used to cause online malcontents to move to the real world and take up arms against governments. You could filter for people who were "easy targets" to trick them and steal their life savings, or better yet, convince them to send you their life savings. You could run a fake church and find the people easily swayed by your specific brand of faith or family that they crave. You could find not just the next lone gunman, you could find a thousand lone gunmen or bombers and set them off all at the same time against a wide variety of targets. You could convince 10,000 people to invest a pittance into a penny stock to make it soar and cash out. You could trigger viral boycotts or artificially construct "Grassroots" organizations. Similar to a recent Black Mirror episode, you could blackmail people but make it automated. Bots could scour the internet for "deviant behavior" in safe pseudo-anonymous communities but connect the profile to real-world profiles and automate threatening them for some kind of action or payout. On the other hand, many of these things could also be used for good depending on your viewpoint. A true believer in a cause might like the ability to easily find and reach out to people who believe in the same cause to form a grassroots campaign. A church with low attendance numbers might be able to find more members for their flock. An intelligent bot system with psychological and marketing profiles on everyone in a country could be used by humanitarians to give certain categories of people (brave, natural leaders with compassion) the prodding and emotional support they need to stand up to militants or warlords. An automated bot that connects pseudo-anonymous identities with real identities could be used to privately and discretely tell trolls to stop their negative behavior. If the tool kits arrive, I anticipate a new wild west of uses... negative, positive, and purely exploitative.