I dislike bots as well.

Unfortunately, the net is awash in bots that attack and mislead people on the net. The only way to counter the bots that are attacking the net is with defensive bots.

Spam is generated by bots. Viruses are bots.

Search engines are generated by bots.

There are numerous bots that harvest and republish content on the net.

I mentioned busy.org. Busy.org is a huge site that republishes posts from SteemIt.com. To an extent, busy.org could be described as a "bot." It is a server that republishes information from SteemIt.com.

Creating a bot is easy.

for (i=0; i<100000000, i++) {
   send spam;
}

People often behave like bots. That's the idea behind memes. A graphic artist creates a provocative graphic and a huge number of people reblog the graphic.

We can't get rid of bots; so we have to talk about what they do and we need to figure out how to deal with issues related to bots.

As @cheetah and steemcleaners are trying to use bots to counter other bots, they are an interesting structure.