Top to Bot-tom

How bot’s have inundated our world, and how we react to them on a day to day.

everyone’s first experience with a bot, which we will define as a robot facsimile of a human, was almost certainly a robo-call. with the first robot-calls being put into place in the early 80s, they’ve been around for quite some time, and can be incredibly useful for large volume alerts and communications. however, in recent years, the tune of robo-calls has been decidedly scammy. Personally, I get at least 4-5 calls a week from a “Scam Likely” unknown number, most of them are some form of IP scam, trying to get bank info. It has honestly faded entirely into the background. that’s a problem, because for many people, it does pose a serious threat. moreover, every time I go into the comments on any popular social media post, I can spot at least a few bots. and then if you click through to their profile, you can see bot generated content, being liked and commented on by other bots, whose own pages are only followed by other robots. there is a veritable ocean of fake content and users being generated every day on some social media platforms. it is like taking off a manhole cover to discover a hole that never ends. These bot’s can be used in many, many ways, in particular on social media platforms they are mostly used to inflate views, likes, comments, and followers. this allows our innate human tribalism to feel better when we like something that is factually dubious. it allows bad actors to sway people into thinking a given belief is more or less popular than it actually is, and through that can control the subconscious, and by a degree then the actions, of the general public. Why is more not being done to combat this? why is it that I can seemingly so easily find so many bots, when a multi-billion dollar company like Google or ByteDance cannot? I think it is mostly because it is in fact much harder to tell bots apart than we think. most good bots are pretty much indistinguishable from a top down view, which makes automated banning extremely hard. we can hope that AI powered moderation tools help with this immensely, but we can also expect AI powered bots to become more and more prevalent, and more and more convincing.