First great post and good question!!
So its a social platform, i think bots take away all purpose of what steemit stands for. I dont want comupters to rate me, i want ppl to discuss and decide about the information and research I deliver.
Facebook is full of bots, bots that can like, they can write posts and add you, its one of the biggest reasons I have dropped facebook. I dont want bots to infiltrate steemit, if we think its ok for them to cast a vote, we one day decide its ok for them to blog posts too, eventually it would get out of control, as more and more people would develop bots for the purpose to create value for themselves, not for the community. To say this is ok because I can upgrade my rep on my account and make a dollar or two, perhaps has a great short term invcentive for each indivdual user and thus it is tempting, but the longterm results for the whole steemit community ,could be destructive for the platform we love so much.
I really hope steemit will ban and fight bots, the community should flag and fight bots. We are scared AI will control all our lives etc and take our jobs, accepting them in our social media is no longer just the beginning, we are in the middle of deciding what to do with this tech and we are going to have to make a decison fast before its too late.
Well bots are a part of tech that isn't going away. We have to accept them. We can decide supporting them or not, we can decide which ones are helpful and which ones are taking money from people.