It may seem as a joke, but I really think that manipulating pseudo-anonymous Internet forums like reddit for political and marketing reasons will prove to be huge driving force for bot development in the coming decade. Right now it's super cheap to just hire some students or task interns with the posting, but remember bots don't leak, don't quit the job and while they do not understand reality you just can't teach human to consider 5000 data points for every comment! And the story about vote manipulation, as shady as it is, still proves that machine that does not understand emotions still uses them in a way that trained humans just couldn't.

I've decided that the outcome of that may not be quite so benign as we'd initially hoped.