And lastly, I am not - by any means - proposing that all curation should be done by bots. Google uses human input in the form of links between pages to guide its algorithms. Similarly, in order to deliver curation that is consistent with human tastes, steembots will always need human input.
I can no more agree with you! As soon as the bot is doing what you want it to do and what you would have done yourself manually, why not?
Well, my perspective on that is largely guided by Jaron Lanier's ideas, here: https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai. In order to be able to do what I would have done manually, I think the bot will always need some input from human voters. Also, considering that my tastes will change over time, there probably needs to be some sort of permanent feedback loop.