The framing of this Financial Times article by Richard Waters is off.

First in the dek, “Machines have an insatiable need for our personal information.” And then again in the body text (so don’t blame it all on SEO):

[T]he machines have an insatiable need, and the processing of this type of personal data won’t stop…

It’s machines don’t need. It’s people that need. I don’t know, maybe people are too easily confused by referring to things as A.I.?

The conclusion hooks back into place though:

Left unchecked, [machine learning systems] could lead to a new digital capitalism run wild, as companies seek to exploit their new powers to understand and influence humanity purely to feed their own bottom lines. This is the warning contained in Surveillance Capitalism, the recent tome by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff that has become a rallying cry for the digitally disaffected.