I think this is already what happens in social media advertising. It’s not hard to develop a pattern of behaviours for a subset of people that lead to conversio

I think this is already what happens in social media advertising. It’s not hard to develop a pattern of behaviours for a subset of people that lead to conversion and then build a model that delivers information to people that leads them on those paths. And conversion doesn’t mean they need to buy a product it could also be accept an idea, vote for a candidate, etc. The scary thing, as you point out, is that this could happen in the real world given the massive amount of data that is passively collected about everything and everybody.