Yeah I agree with this for the most part. Though I have some suspicions that some of the machine learning algorithms used by social media have been exhibiting some emergent behavior. But given that their directive is to sell as many ads as possible, and the fact that advertising is basically just low level emotional manipulation to convince people to buy shit, any emergent behavior would be surrounding emotionally manipulating people.

Kinda getting into tin foil hat territory here, but developing AI under the direction of marketing assholes doesn’t seem like it’s going to go anywhere good.