Physical robots have been a pursuit since the dawn of imagination spurred visions of automating life. But there’s another class of robotics with more impact and potential than the domain of physical robots: software bots. Today, these virtual bots persist and dance across the fabric of the internet with purposes both malicious and benevolent. And the bot revolution has only just begun. The inevitable march towards deeper integration between the human experience and computing are demanding new frameworks, interaction patterns, and phyla of bots.

The Bots are Here

What exactly defines a bot? My answer may be different than more conventional views. I see a bot as something akin to a biologic cell: focused in purpose; self-contained; self-replicating; interacting through distributed communication patterns and networks; autonomous; and ultimately existing as a lower order functional entity with a high degree of specialization. Bots can work together in larger complex arrays, much like multi-cellular organisms, to accomplish higher order functions and interactions. These arrays of bots exist on a continuum of automation and intelligence. It is interesting to observe that higher degrees of automation are often associated with intelligence (and sometimes magic).

And leading IT platforms of today are all working on some form of intelligent bot, but I suggest that these bots are really just automation agents existing separate and apart from our individual self. The idea of talking at an external agent to automate interactions on a platform is certainly a powerful concept but ultimately not the world I see us heading towards. Even if you consider that these are placeholders for gradual upgrades to “Artificial Intelligence,” the separation of state between the true user self and agent will remain a constraint and source of friction.

We are on a collision course with direct computing interfaces to our biologic self. The world is expanding its interaction in the virtual and online domain at a dramatically faster rate than the physical domain, because the online world is not constrained by physical limits. Computing is becoming a deeper extension of ourselves as we more directly wield its power to address individual needs and challenges.

The Transformation

As an engineering student I was always fascinated with the idea of mathematical transforms. A primary use of transforms is to convert a mathematical problem into an abstract mathematical domain, where the rules of the abstract domain allow the problem to be solved in a more computationally efficient manner. Once the result is computed, the answer is transformed back into the context of the original problem domain.

It can be helpful to consider modern computing as a transform that projects our real world requests and problems into a virtual domain, where the rules of computing and networks provide a more efficient and comprehensive solution path than if we were limited to carrying out those tasks in the physical world. Once the request is fulfilled or the problem solved, the results are projected back into the physical domain through the interfaces of electronics and computers.

We are all Made of Bots

Ultimately our projection or transform in to the virtual computing domain mimics a more modern view of our physical self. Instead of a hierarchical cell, tissue, organ framework our human bodies can be considered a container of floating ecosystems constantly interacting across a distributed system. In the same way, our virtual selves will begin to resemble a flattening container of complex distributed arrays of bot frameworks, a nod to biomimetics.

An initial attempt at this concept is well underway through the appification of our lives. Countless specialized software apps exist ready for download and use on our mobile phones. But like so many other prehistoric experiments in nature’s lab, this branch of computing genetics is likely to meet a fate of demise. The world has evolved to a pervasive and expansive grid of computing, networking, and distributed communications. And the largely siloed and transactional app of today will give way to specialized bots that seamlessly and efficiently connect, organize, and conform to our larger needs and human interaction patterns.

The Age of Bots

The Age of Bots is near as platforms and startups expand further into distributed and containerized micro-services, running on automated, grid-scale computing infrastructure. Computing begins to resemble networking concepts with graphs of nodes compared to current discrete and monolithic applications running on servers.

If we peer further down the evolutionary path of bots, I see a complex web of self-composed bot arrays orchestrated in dynamic and fluid cadence, driven by a circular flow of interactions between our lives and the connected systems that surround us. As these interactions merge into a constant stream of transforms, projecting between physical and virtual domains, a hybrid terrain is formed that presents new challenges in security, privacy, and identity management.

And The Age of Machina is not far behind with self-piloted vehicles, higher levels of equipment automation, and refined robotic platforms. But even these platforms will take on behaviors and personas and leverage software bots to acquire processing and knowledge gain. Imagine: Cutting through the night, a vehicle hurtles towards a twisting series of switchbacks in the mountains. On-board vehicle systems reach back to persistent airships and roving drones that silently provide overwatch for potential hazards from weather or obstacles. A sea of software bots ingest and synthesize thousands of parallel sensor nodes and data feeds in real-time, deftly adjusting traction control, speed and direction to safely navigate the roadway.

Have your Bot call my Bot

Ultimately, a multitude of unique bot and framework classes will be required to perform complex tasks. But how do we interact with that complexity? It has been said that the best user interface is no interface. The more we are able, in an automated and intuitive way, to project our environment, needs, and problems into a virtual computing domain, the less we need to directly interact with other agents and systems. At some point I will not need to verbalize basic requests to an AI entity. The AI agent will just contact my extended self, enabled in part by wearable sensors and IoT systems, utilizing bot to bot communications to understand and react.

Over time, the classic human computing interface will simplify. And conversely, the interaction patterns of underlying bots and frameworks will expand. The dynamic nature of coalescing various bot specializations to form a higher order activity or function suggests new modes of coordination and signaling. Consider some examples of potential bot classes:

Search Bot

As information and data diffuses to the periphery of the internet’s observable boundary, Search Bots will provide personalized and highly tuned data crawling and synthesis. Scouring the plains of data grids, in conjunction with search service platforms, Search Bots would be aware of personal context and have the ability to conduct finely grained information or functional searches with strong disambiguation. Search is not just informational but transactional to include product purchase or personal services.

Sentinel Bot

Sentinel Bots will provide critical security monitoring, defenses and responses. Complex coordination of specialized Sentinel Bots from a broad array of algorithmic and heuristic based services would provide robust and scaleable multi-layered protection. Sentinel bots would coordinate with physical systems to extend security state and awareness across the virtual and physical domain.

Transact Bot

Traversing networks, accessing data, and purchasing services or other bots may require the ability to complete autonomous transactions. Transact Bots will coordinate with a central platform or internally store virtual currency to complete transactions following custom limits and validations.

Terraform Bot

Terraform Bots will provision and partition bare metal computing and storage resources, grooming them for virtualized network and processing requirements of specialized frameworks. Terraform Bots will be capable of on-demand instantiation of higher layer processing and network elements that may be used to dynamically generate virtual worlds or complex infrastructure overlays.

Bot Battles

Given the previous bot class examples, let’s consider the following scenario to examine how they might interact:

It’s early in the morning, and you have just activated three highly sensitive searches around critical research and intellectual property for a startup company concept. An hour later your home’s intrusion monitor detects suspicious activity at the north east corner of your backyard. The alert is instantly forwarded to your search sentinel bots, and it will be the last, as the power to your home and communications are taken offline. The Search Bots have had a successful run of deep data mining and experiments with two critical discoveries. Without the embedded intellectual property the Search would have been a failure. As the Search Bots prepare to update their status, the security alert is received by the attached Sentinel Bots. The Sentinel Bots are called into immediate action as they coordinate with Transacts bots to purchase computing resources to increase defensive posture, anticipating a potential offensive. Instantly, multiple echelons of advanced Sentinels are generated with specializations ranging from general threat detection to advanced encoding and encryption techniques. At the same time Sentinel Bots are engaged with the Terraform Bots to produce complex routers and virtual networking infrastructure to establish secure pathways of returning the critical discoveries. As the defenses organize, the first volley occurs. A massive army of Probe Bots map the perimeter defenses and marshall resources around a more focused set of attacks. The plan is simple: Overwhelm your bots and interrupt their ability to spawn new defensive resources. Your Sentinel Bots predict this attack vector. The Terraform bots are re-directed to allocate all compute power to generate massive volumes of data while a squadron of encryption bots employ a one time key to begin encrypting and sharding the critical discovery data across the gigabits of new data. Ultimately your bot defenses are overwhelmed, but not before a lone Sentinel was able to escape through a transient virtual network router. The Sentinel will remain hidden until you are able to securely retrieve it and the location of the encrypted data.

The Botification of Me: A Personal Bot OS

While the bot battle scenario is somewhat contrived, it does depict the need for coordinating forces and frameworks to successfully marshall disparate bot classes. Ultimately this will require multiple forms of bot OS frameworks. But one of the most fundamental and foundational OS frameworks must start with a personal bot OS: the bot OS of you. Without a deeply connected and intimately trusted OS framework to coordinate personal bots, it will be difficult to effectively realize the full potential and benefits of the larger concepts.

We have hardly scratched the surface of what it might mean to have a deeply connected personal array of bots, much less the larger domain of pervasive bot based systems. I plan to expand on these concepts and delve deeper into the classes and anatomy of bots, while considering higher layer bot OS frameworks. I hope you will join me for the conversation, and I welcome all feedback.

-David Odom

[Credits: Layout, Illustration, and Concepts: David Odom, Robots: Simon Child and Julian Roman from the Noun Project]