Algorithms are moving out of the Platonic realm and are becoming dynamic first class players in real life. We've seen corporations become people. Algorithms will likely also follow that path to agency.

Kevin Slavin in his intriguing TED talk: How Algorithms Shape Our World, gives many and varied examples of how algorithms have penetrated RL. 

One of his most interesting examples is from a highly technical paper on Relativistic statistical arbitrage, which says to make money on markets you have to be where the people are, the red dots (on the diagram below), which means you have to put servers where the blue dots are, many of which are in the ocean. Here's the diagram from the paper:

Mr. Slavin neatly sums this up by saying:

And it's not the money that's so interesting actually. It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy. They're prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we're making. And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms -- the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are.

The introduction to the paper spells out why this is so: