"Are Bots Eating The World" Conference Call

While there's no doubt that bots are having a moment, they've been around since the beginning of the Internet, in 1993, when Eggdrop was developed to moderate Internet Relay Chat. The reason for all the new interest is the belief that the emergence of the cloud, big data, machine learning, and AI, will enable a rapid increase in the functionality of bots. That said, early reviews for Messenger bots indicate it's off to a rocky start. Which is better than the experience of Microsoft's AI Twitter bot "Tay", which learned to be a racist in less than 24 hours. So what does 2016 hold for the world of bots?