The moral case for bot use... or how to become an amBOTsador!

The German version of the headlines pun is a much better one, for "Bot-schafter" really means ambassador.

Bots are evil! Bots are evil?

Well, normally I am much into doing things personally and not automating too much. I hated bots in games like diablo, warcraft and others. I hated bots in chatrooms, kicking me for not understanding jokes I made.
Then as young adult, beginning to try to understand what was going on,  I was told bots taking away our work and replace real persons, kind of cheating away their livelihood. I loved movies like I-robot, Surrogates and finally Terminator.

I tried to explain everybody who wanted to hear it or not, how bad bots are... guess I really was very young then... and that one day we´ll all be doomed because of bots.

Well what changed?

I started to think really about what bots can do and what they have done so far. I guess everybody must admit, that there is SOME work that bots can do better, more precise, faster and of course 24/7 without fatigue. This results in a very high quality and -believe it or not- releases manpower for work that can only, or better be done by humans.

Take this example: There is a video available on youtube about a Sci-Fi movie, written by an AI (artificial intelligence). The script is hillarious. It is obvious that there is still a very, very long way to go until a bot can produce real "thoughts". ("Sunspring" video)

As funny and as useless this video may seem, it is insane how much human efforts were put in the AI and later in the movie to make a step further in AI development and in "nerd stuff". All in all AI somehow created a lot of  jobs in this case.


A little historical excursion
( you may skip this paragraph, it´s beside the point I want to make, but interesting non the less )


Let´s shortly look at this myth of "job stealing". The first revolution in automation was of course in agriculture. Before the use of machines there were used slaves and other "cheap" labourers. With the use of machines, less and less humans were needed on the fields. At first that was a problem, but then people went into the city and brought their workforce to other places or invented new jobs. People thought about what can be done to be useful again. The result was the industrial revolution. 

It worked out. Not instantly, but it worked. As a result grain, corn, milk etc. are as cheap as never before (of course in relation to working time in relation to the amount that can be bought with the reward of that time). In agriculture it was totally normal to work 10 to 14 hours a day and that barely was enough to buy the food you needed. It was great working in factories at first. Later in around 1850 same thing... 6 days work up to 14 hours a daily. Which changed down to less than 40 hours / week for most today due to automation.

Finally there were numerous more "automation revolutions" and nearly every one of these made quality higher, workpieces more perfect, and reduced the amount of working power and time needed to sustain a normal life. Well there are exeptions, but I guess you all get my general point.

Let´s agree, that never throughout history it was possible to spend as much time being creative, thinking about ideas, caring about children or just wasting time (like most).

What this has to do with bots in Steemit, you may ask...

Well Steemit is in my view a platform to create ideas, content, fun, good thoughts, critics and so on. It´s in my view revolutionary as well, for being blockchain based and all the positives that come with that fact.
There are of course some negatives, some issues to deal with.

    1) plagiarism (@cheetah bot is taking care of this. Not perfectly, but better everyday )

     2) spam (guess there are some bots online for that. Unfortunately for both sides ) 

     3) Welcoming people with some information on how to start, what to do (@wang was a great ides, but
          taken  down due to much undeserved hate)

     4) The insane amount of great content that is "forgotten" inbetween the first two hours if not whale-kissed.

     5) The rising amount of content that has to be sorted, checked, categorized

Personally I believe it would be great beeing helped by a little helper (or numerous little helpers) that can release thinking and working power to the things that really matter. A little friend who will have a look into my feed and remind me that there is a post that needs to be read ( such as "text longer than 20 words", "prefered author from feed") or something like that.

I can think about hundrets of nice features that can help me on steemit without corrupting the system.
As well I can think of numerous ways to exploit the system as well.

This is a problem that has to be fixed. May be that this will result in a bot - war. But this is a task for the humans again. Find exploit bots. Vote them down! But let you help wherever it is reasonable...

Forbidding them is not the voluntary way.

As mentioned I am thinking a lot of what can be done with bots. I decided to go into the task and build my own little helper. My little brother ... just to proove that a bot can be of much use for all of us.

Let me introduce to you @castor.one (for those not aware of greek mythologie... Castor is the brother of Pollux)
I will explain in a series of posts, how I started, what I had to fix, what I had to do, where were the problems etc. etc.
I will also inform what castor is able to do, when I found a way to do it.

My personal rules:

-Never Castor will flag anyone
-Never he will exploit steemit
-Most things he will be able to do will be on a voluntary base (you will have to call for his help )

Castor will be a nice guy, trying to help. So if you encounter him, tell him if you don´t like what he is doing.
He will also need your help to learn, to grow, to get better and making less mistakes.

Let´s see where this will get,
perhaps I will be able to help you realising your dream of a little helper, too.