Do you guys feel that all the fear, divisiveness, and hate crimes is an output of the function of algorithms?
Beginning with the start of television and news reporting, it quickly became the realization that reporting on and promoting fear raised viewership and income. Playing this out long term, we can see disturbed and easily influenced individuals acting on the fear created by these networks, thus creating more stories for the media to cover to create more fear and divisiveness.
Now, onto why I think algorithms may be the cause of the growing international tension and terrorism. Algorithms because, as pointed out above, this same increased viewership and increased income created by fear that was successful for the TV networks was also successful for the internet. However, algorithms ran by a computer, which are millions of times more effective than humans running TV networks, has accelerated the fear, crimes, and seeming chaos to speeds that could not have been matched by television.
A website creator, blogger, business owner, developer, whatever you want it to be, can create an algorithm with the sole purpose of promoting content that increases viewership. This algorithm can then, over a period of time, realize that increased user interactivity and returned visits is created by promoting content containing political divisiveness and fear.
Because of the effectiveness of these algorithms and the data mined from humans through various methods, these algorithms can then figure out the even more deepseated fears that humans have, and personalize the content to be even more effective, essentially building upon itself to solve the task that it was first set out to do.
Is this the AI singularity we talk about being in the future? Is this how AI is going to destroy humanity; not by their own will, but by human's own stupidity to look at the present moment and realize what is happening.