@atomicpoet Sooner or later, the bit owners are going to realise that just having bits post and interact with each other doesn’t support the business model. The customers are the advertisers, and not posts/interactions done result in attributable sales, so next the bots will need to start clicking ads and buying things. This will result in bots run by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other social media and eBay advertising companies - all secretly start buying actual physically products with real money from their own advertisers to “prove” how well their ad targeting tools work. Eventually, of course, actual people using social networks and ad supported websites will be classified as “problematic” because of their unpredictable buying behaviour.

Then, depending on how deeply entrenched the bots are when we get to that stage, we either get SkyNet, or - and think about this for a minute - something that looks exactly like Twitter in the last 6 months…