Facebook’s bots are already revolting

Facebook has become a social network for cyborgs. It happened yesterday at Facebook developer conference F8. While everyone was busy eye-rolling over Mark Zuckerberg's keynote about saving the world, the company launched a bot revolution. Ironically (or not), these bots will eventually replace tech workers in the exact emerging markets that Zuck vowed to rescue with his largesse.

The core of Facebook's idea is to chase its ever-expanding audience, which is flocking to Messenger. Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app in the US, and now it has almost a billion users. Though Facebook itself claims 1.59 billion monthly active users, it's obvious that Messenger has grown massively since becoming a standalone app in 2014. So Facebook is turning Messenger into a platform with open APIs. And just as developers once built apps on top of Facebook, they'll now build bots on top of Messenger.

What does that mean? Facebook obviously doesn't have the answer yet—that's why they're inviting developers to figure it out for them. That said, there are a few hints of the bot ecosystem to come. In its announcement of the Messenger Platform, the company explains:

Bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.

Primarily, bots will let you access services and stores by chatting instead of clicking. Want to get the news? Just tell a bot to feed you everything relevant to your interests in cross-site request forgeries and Seattle fetish events. Want to book a hotel room? The Hotels.com bot will happily discuss it with you for a few seconds and then recommend some options that fit your criteria. Sometimes bots will hand you off to a human who can answer questions about your clothing purchase that are too nuanced for a piece of software to tackle.

In a few cases, bots will behave like browsers. They will be the nuggets of software that connect people with information they once got on the Web. There's room for bots on the Web, though. Facebook is making it easy for developers to embed Messenger bots on their websites.

But more than anything else, the rise of the bots signals the death of the mobile app. One could easily imagine, for example, ordering food from a Postmates bot would be roughly the same experience as using the app. Facebook isn't the only company to notice that the whole app thing didn't really work out. There are a few wildly popular apps (Facebook among them), but generally people don't like downloading a zillion apps to their mobiles. Why have separate doorways to every single thing you do online when you could just have one doorway called Messenger?

Bots will make it easy to leapfrog over apps, but they will also do something that bots always do—at least, in science fiction. They will replace humans. Already, many of us spend time talking to bots on the phone, learning to enunciate our account numbers clearly enough for their voice recognition systems. With Facebook's help, we'll be talking to them a lot more. Bots will be the automated service workers of the next five years, allowing you to circumvent humans in your quest to get everything from tech support to airline tickets.

This brings me back to my earlier point about how bots will destroy the emerging markets that Zuck claims he wants to support. Currently, most of the humans doing online service and support work are in the developing world. Some of them are even employed writing the responses that bots will one day use in service jobs that humans no longer qualify for. Whether you think this is a bad thing depends—economist Brad DeLong has long argued that labor will eventually recover from the rise of robots, while political commentator Zeynep Tufekci is less sanguine. Regardless of your opinions about the long-term outcome, the fact is that in the near future bots will take over jobs currently done by people in emerging markets.

Right now, of course, the bot situation on Facebook is embarrassing. The company launched Messenger Bots yesterday and the results are predictably hilarious. Things that are not yet programmed to be bots—like television shows and news sources—are being promoted as bots. Here's what Facebook suggests the future will look like:

But here's what I saw:

It's easy to make fun of a new app, and I don't think these screwups are indicative of what Messenger Bots will look like in a year. But they do hint at Facebook's new strategy, which is to blur the line even further between real humans and brands. The company's great hope seems to be that you'll treat friends and bots as roughly the same things, chatting with both to get what you want—which is, as this scary Messenger Bots teaser video suggests, to buy houses, take selfies, and buy stuff to go along with both.

I doubt that this world of interchangeable humans and bots is what Zuck had in mind when he founded Facebook, but maybe it was. I mean, Facebook is founded on the notion that you can accumulate, trade, and sort friends the same way you do with a collection of toys. Maybe the Facebook bot revolution was inevitable after all.