ABSTRACT
Philip K. Dick’s seminal novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted into the film Blade Runner ), poses multiple questions about the relations between humans and non-humans. One such question concerns whether we might one day reach a future in which robotic humanoids (i.e. the titular ‘androids’) and humans are no longer easily distinguishable. In the age of social media, it is now evident that the question Dick initiated over half a century ago has found particular relevance in the figure of the ‘socialbot’. As Gehl contends: ‘The last tweet you got may have been from a robot’ (Gehl, 2014, p. 21). Yet ‘bots’, loosely defined as software applications involved in the automation of tasks over the Internet, have existed since at least the mid-1990s. For example, web crawlers (bots that assist in the collection and indexing of web content) and ‘spambots’ (bots that send massive volumes of unsolicited ‘spam’ email) are so mundane as to appear almost invisible nowadays. Similarly, chatbots or ‘chatterbots’ (bots that engage in conversation in online spaces) have existed since the early years of the web (Mauldin, 1994), and have developed into the research area of ‘conversational agents’ (see also Chapter 5). Scholars have also recently explored the role of bots in automated high-frequency trading within global financial markets, drawing to attention the world-shaking events that can emerge as a result of their complex interactions (Steiner, 2012).
