The context for my point is that we already have authoritarian countries (i.e China, Russia) already using the internet for mass surveillance (and selling the technology to other countries), we have Trump (who has to be considered at least a quasi-authoritarian at this point) purging civil servant who are insufficiently loyal to him.

And these are not power that will have intrinsic knowledge or care about things we may understand intuitively: the error rate of a prediction model, false positives/negatives in classification, the difficulty of producing a reliable model of human emotion, how easy it is to build bias into a ML model, etc.