Greeting user 173682 you have not met your weekly minimum posting amount and have been scheduled for termination. Ah, bots how I do not like them very much even though some of them can be useful at times.

Auto Upvote

I never thought of these big issues at first. Sure some people have flood free account creation back in the day and have thousands of accounts but these have so little SP their votes are still worthless. A few days ago when auto voting from the varies curtains services outside of Steemit were hindered due do to steemdb being down. It struck me as a “wow” when the site went from having these instant $200-500$ posts by the same people over and over to them only getting $20 after 30 minutes. Lots of people were running around getting angry that there “90 minutes” worth of work did not yield them their usual $200+ post right away. People were in fact not getting their auto upvoters.
It's kind of scary to think that some of the biggest publishers here have such a massive following that auto upvotes them for either what they write or trying to cash in on that “curating” rewards. Even when these people who have signed up to auto upvote are no longer using Steemit their votes are still being cast. I can’t help but feel this is not the best spirit for Steemit. Sure, this rewards those who have put I the time to build up an audience but imagine if Youtube just allowed your viewers to “auto view” your video without ever seeing it.

I have also run into accounts that just spam out 4 blogs a day 1 or 2 scenes and 1 imagine and they get $5 in upvotes from auto upvoting. These types of people clearly are not posting to try and benefit Steemit in some way or another with their blog. They are simply cashing in on what ever auto upvotes they have been given or traded for to start with. This to me shows how easy it is to abuse upvotes in the first place. At what point do people who are getting $100+ in upvotes per blog stop spending half a way writing their blog filled with deep ideas and just put out 4 blogs a day instead to make four times their earnings. Sure over time their income might decrease as people remove their votes. But then again those people would still have to be here to notice it in the first place.

Spam bots

Out side of what you have mentioned such as minnowsupport, cheetah and the likes which I view as positive. This site is just getting flooded with spam. It's hard to tell if those who are doing it are even bots or just humans that are very bad at communicating. I’m sure you have seen them the “I’ve upvoted you upvote me” and other nonsense that could be automated with a bot if they choose. I’ve even run into accounts just spamming out resteems asking for a .001 SBD to people spamming images trying to create fights. It's an issue that is only going to grow.

A lot of people think “oh a bot will never replace humans on Steemit.” They will never create blogs and leave comments that could ever fool anyone. Well, I wish that was the case. Here in America at least a lot of call centers are investing into AI chat bots. AI is growing thing and will be more comment I suspect over the years when people call to complain about services or damaged devices. You have things such as Microsoft’s Tay and IBM’s Watson. Granted one of these had a meltdown on twitter and the other one answer questions on game shows just to as examples of things they were doing. I’m sure by now they are much better and even sounding and responding more “human” like.

Automation

We humans seem to love just creating automation to reduce our workloads. There will be a point where we just have nothing left to do. Bots will take care of everything for you and that is it. Perhaps they will just keep us in cages so we can't injure ourselves. Who knows what that kind of world will hold. Lots of jobs are being replaced by Automation around the world more so every day. Everyone seems to think what they do will never be replaced. Why, yes even the programmers will be replaced by AI writing their own scripts. There are already 100% automated factory that shut down completely when a human has to come out to space them since they are not saving for a single human to be inside them. At some point, Steemit will have to do something to combat the chat robots or it will just be a site of bots talking with bots upvoting bots. I would not be surprised if there are already people using chat bots and no one noticed. We have some very intelligent people on this site who I can only assume have some backgrounds in this kind of thing already.

All I know is my favorite part about steemit is posting comments. I fear my long replies and time spent doing so will be one of the first things chat bots will be able to replace. Since they just have to interact with something already created and don’t have worry about creating something new. That could also just be my fear of being further replaced as I already have been a few times in life by automation and bots.