It's fascinating to speculate where we're heading.

I don't personally credit humans, with their continual profit driven motives, with the intelligence or capability to run large scale monitoring or surveillance let alone cabals of manipulation but I do think that such a state of affairs is well within the capabilities of a future AGI.

I'm in the camp of pushing forward with AI research as it's a genii that can't be put back in the bottle and if one company doesn't do it then another one certainly will.

I do hope, however, that as with arms races between superpowers of the past, ads vs. blockers of today, et al. that AI development will keep itself in check with continual countermeasures.

It's a wide open field.

(Great article, by the way)