IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 6

EDITORIAL

Katina Michael

Bot Developments
bot (short for robot)
performs highly re -
petitive t a s k s by
automatically gather-
ing or posting infor-
mation based on a set of algorithms.
Internet-based bots can create new
content and interact with other users
like any human would. Bots are not
neutral. They always have an under-
lying intent toward direct or indirect
benefit or harm. The power is always
with the individual(s)/organization(s)
unleashing the bot, and imbued
with the developer's subjectivity and
bias [1].
Bots can be overt or covert to
subjects; they can deliberately "lis-
ten" and then in turn manipulate
situations providing real information
or disinformation (known also as
automated propaganda). They can
target individuals or groups and suc-
cessfully alter or even disrupt group-
think, and equally silence activists
trying to bring attention to a given
cause (e.g., human rights abuses by
governments). On the flipside, bots
can be used as counterstrategies in
raising awareness of political wrong-
doing (e.g., censorship) but also be
used for terrorist causes appealing
to a global theatre (e.g., ISIS) [2].
Software engineers and compu-
ter programmers have developed
bots that can do superior conver-
sational analytics, bots to analyze
human sentiment in social media

A

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2697067
Date of publication: 8 June 2017

6

Bots Trending Now
Disinformation and Calculated
Manipulation of the Masses
might intervene to enable a direct
answer to a more complex problem.
This is known as a hybrid delivery
model where bot and human work
together to solve a customer inquiry.
The customer may detect a slower
than usual response in the chat win-
dow, but is willing to wait given the
asynchronous mode of communica-
tions, and the mere fact they don't
have to converse with a real person
over the telephone. The benefit to
the consumer is said to be bypassing
a human clerk and wait times for a
representative, and the benefit to the
service provider is in saving the cost
of human resources, including ongo-
ing training.
Bots that interact with humans
and go undetected as being non-hu-
man are considered successful in
their implementation, and are said
to pass the Turing Test [8]. Devised
in 1950, English mathematician,
Alan M. Turing suggested the "imi-
tation game," which consisted of a
remote human interrogator within
a fixed time frame being able to dis-
tinguish between a computer and
a human subject based on their
replies to various questions posed by
the interrogator [9].

platforms such as Facebook [3] and
Twitter [4], and bots to get value
out of unstructured data using a
plethora of big data techniques. It
won't be long before we have bots
to analyse audio using natural lan-
guage processing, and commensu-
rate bots to analyze and respond to
uploaded videos on YouTube, and
even bots that respond with human-
like speech contextually adapted for
age, gender, and even culture. The
convergence of this suite of capabili-
ties is known as artificial intelligence
[5]. Bots can be invisible, they can
appear as a 2D embodied agent on
a screen (avatar or dialog screen), or
as a 3D object (e.g., toy) or human-
oid robot (e.g., Bina [6] and Pepper).

Bots that Pass the Turing Test
Most consumers who use instant
messaging chat programs to inter-
act with their service providers very
well might not realize that they have
likely interacted with a chat bot that
is able to crawl through a provider's
public Internet page for information
acquisition [7]. After 3-4 interactions
with the bot, that can last anything
between 5 to 10 minutes, a human
customer service representative
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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june 2017



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