The common bot - species, development and breeding
summary
Bots are described as persistent, autonomous, reactive programs that stitch APIs and data sets together; examples include Eggdrop and megaHAL for chat, Twitter bots like skitbot and activism bots such as @congressedits, and art bots (a Bitcoin-funded shopping bot that actually bought and exhibited items). Wikipedia runs ~600,000 lines of MediaWiki and an order‑of‑magnitude more ecosystem code, so bots scale work and harm; recommended mitigations include simple algorithms, legal shutdown buttons and running services on your own stack (Nextcloud).
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction to bots
- 3:37Defining bot characteristics
- 4:21Hello World and bot evolution
- 5:04Eliza and human projections
- 7:58Social bots and moral panic
- 10:26Bot subcultures and examples
- 12:37Wikipedia's bot ecosystem
- 14:45Artistic and playful bots
- 15:49Legal and ethical implications
- 17:53Gender bias in bot design
- 19:59Building responsible bots
- 21:41Bots reflect cultural conditions
- 22:07Q&A on bot management
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