Leonard explores the advantages and downside of bots, software that operate with little or no human supervision. Like it or hate it, bots have become an essential tool for surfing the internet. Because of the internet's vast resources, users must rely on programs such as Yahoo and Excite to find relevant information.
Leonard traces their development from the halls of academia to the board rooms of multinational firms. Bots were first called daemons, a greek term that means beings that mediate between humans and gods. Bots received this appellation because they are the mediating agent between computers and humans.
Their number and abilities coincided with the complexity and diversity of the internet. Originally, bots were assigned the tasks of searching and retrieving information, but their duties expanded to include censoring, distributing on a massive scale, monitoring, and performing other functions. Their usefulness made them popular among programmers, who created and unleashed, sometimes recklessly, many bots into cyberspace.
The variety of duties that bots perform result from the ongoing conflicts between users of the internet. There is an evolution between various forms of bots. For example, advertisers employ 'spambots' to solicit business whilst 'mailbots' filter unwanted emails, especially advertisements. These bots are becoming increasingly complex as each side attempts to thwart the efforts of the other.
The often-times acrimonious relationship between various interest groups that use the internet and the increasing volume of e-commerce and internet surfers will only make the internet more vital but also more complex. Bots will only become more important and more sophisticated. Already there is research into creating bots that can evolve by themselves.
As our lives become more entwined with the internet there will be continuous debates about the potential danger of relying too heavily on bots and whether bots, as they become more autonomous, constitute living beings.
