as a first step to larger fraudulent activity on the web (such as creating fake accounts to use for scams on dating apps). They artificially inflate the popularity of celebrities and politicians, as companies sell thousands of fake online followers for only a few dollars (Confessore et al., 2018).
As obedient agents following their developers’ programming, bots’ uses and “interests” are as diverse as humans themselves. They can be written in nearly any programming language. They can sleuth from website to website, looking for relevant information on a desired topic or individual. They are active on nearly all modern social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, YouTube – and keep the wheels turning at other popular sites like Wikipedia. They can interact with other users as official customer service representatives, chat under the guise of a human user, or work silently in the background as digital wallflowers, watching users and websites, silently gathering information, or gaming algorithms for their own purposes.
This book is about bots in all their diversity: what they do, why they’re made, who makes them, how they’ve evolved over time, and where they are heading. Throughout these chapters, we’ll draw on research from diverse fields – including communications, computer science, linguistics, political science, and sociology – to explain the origins and workings of bots. We examine the history and development of bots in the technological and social worlds, drawing on the authors’ expertise from a decade of interviews in the field and hands-on research at the highest levels of government, academia, and the private sector.
It’s easy to think bots only emerged on the internet in the last few years, or that their activities are limited to spamming Twitter with political hashtags, but nothing could be further from the truth. Bots’ history is as long as that of modern computers themselves. They facilitate interpersonal communication, enhance political communication through getting out the vote or supercharging low-resourced activists, degrade political communication through spam and computational propaganda, streamline formulaic legal processes, and form the backbone of modern commerce and financial transactions. They also interact with one another – allowing computers to communicate with each other to keep the modern web running smoothly. Few technologies have influenced our lives as profoundly and as silently as bots. This is their story, and the story of how bots have transformed not only technology, but also society. The ways we think, speak, and interact with each other have all been transformed by bots.
Our hope is that through this book, the reader will gain a thorough understanding how technology and human communication intertwine, shaping politics, social life, and commerce. Throughout these seven chapters, we’ll cover all these areas in detail. In this chapter, we give the history of bots and define the different types of bots. In Chapter 2, Bots and Social Life, we explore the role that these computational agents play across global digital society. Chapter 3 explores the various ways that bots have been used for political communications, for both good and bad purposes, focusing especially on the advent of widespread digital campaigning and social media political bots in the last decade. In Chapter 4, we turn to the role of bots in the private sector, detailing commercial uses of automated agents over time in finance, customer service, and marketing. Chapter 5 explores the intersection of bots and artificial intelligence (AI). In Chapter 6, we trace the history of bot theory in academia – drawing on social science, philosophy, art, and computer science – to understand how the conception of bots has evolved over time and to consider bots’ future, particularly as it relates to questions in policy, ethics, and research. Finally, we close with thoughts on the future of bots, and key recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and technologists working on bots in the future.
Where Does the Word ‘‘Bot’’ Come From?
“Bot” is a shortened version of the word “robot.” While the concept of a self-managing machine that performs tasks has arguably been around for hundreds of years (for example, DaVinci’s 1479 mechanical knight), the word “robot” was not coined until 1920. It was originated by Czech playwright and activist Karel Capek in a play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (“RUR”). In the play, the titular robots are humanlike machine workers who lack a soul, which are produced and sold by the R.U.R. company in order to increase the speed and profitability of manufacturing. Capek called these machines roboti at the suggestion of his brother Josef, who adapted the term from the Czech words robotnik (“forced worker”) and robota (“forced labor, compulsory service”) (Flatow, 2011; Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). Robota has cognates in other modern European languages, such as the German Arbeit (“work”). Inherent in these roots is the idea of forced servitude, even slavery – a robot is an object that carries out tasks specified by humans. This idea is key to the understanding of bots in the online sphere today, where bots are computer programs that carry out a set of instructions defined, ultimately, by a human. There is always a human designer behind a bot.
While “bot” began as a shortened form of “robot,” in the era of the modern internet, the connotations of the two terms have diverged. Bot is now used mostly to designate software programs, most of which run online and have only a digital presence, while robots are commonly conceived of as possessing a physical presence in the form of hardware – of having some form of physical embodiment. Wired journalist Andrew Leonard writes that bots are “a software version of a mechanical robot” whose “physical manifestation is no more than the flicker of electric current through a silicon computer chip” (Leonard, 1997, pp. 7–24). Today, social bots’ implementation may involve a visual presence, such as a profile on Twitter or Facebook, but the core of their functioning lies in the human-designed code that dictates their behavior.
History of the Bot
Many people think that bots emerged only recently, in the wake of the incredibly rapid uptake of smartphones and social media. In fact, although they emerged into mainstream consciousness relatively recently, bots are nearly as old as computers themselves, with their roots going back to the 1960s. However, it is difficult to trace the history of the bot, because there is no standard, universally accepted definition for what exactly a bot is. Indeed, bot designers themselves often don’t agree on this question. We’ll begin this history by discussing some of the first autonomous programs, called daemons, and with the birth of the world’s most famous chatbot in the late 1960s.
Early bots – Daemons and ELIZA
Daemons, or background processes that keep computers running and perform vital tasks, were one of the first forms of autonomous computer programs to emerge. In 1963, MIT Professor Fernando Corbato conceived of daemons as a way to save himself and his students time and effort using their shared computer, the IBM 7094. While it is debatable whether these programs count as bots (it depends on how you define bot), their autonomy makes them noteworthy as a precursor to more advanced bots (McKelvey, 2018).
A more recognizable bot emerged only three years later. In 1966, another MIT professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, programmed ELIZA – the world’s first (and most famous) chatbot,1 arguably “the most important chatbot dialog system in the history of the field” (Jurafsky & Martin, 2018, p. 425). ELIZA was a conversational computer program with several “scripts.” The most famous of these was the DOCTOR script, under which ELIZA imitated a therapist, conversing with users about their feelings and asking them to talk more about themselves. Using a combination of basic keyword detection, pattern matching,2 and canned responses, the chatbot would respond to users by asking for further information or by strategically changing the subject (Weizenbaum, 1966). The program was relatively simple
