Question
Imagine that there's an ecosystem that's populated by two species of animals. Call them "bots" and "humans."
Now, imagine that the bots and the humans in this ecosystem compete for a single supply of nourishment, call it, "Curation Rewards." If the bots get all the curation rewards, the humans go extinct. In contrast, the bots go extinct if curation rewards all go to humans. Naturally, bots excel at some things, while humans excel at others.
My question is: Under what conditions do the two species coevolve into symbiotic species, and under what conditions do they coevolve into competitors so that one eventually deprives the other of curation rewards and drives it into extinction?
Background
I often see it argued here that bots can be useful for detecting plagiarism and the like (whatever the like is), but that only humans can determine the quality of an article. As I noted here, I disagree with that perspective. I think that human and bot curators are both vital to steemit's long term success.
Google's Page Rank system has already proved that humans and algorithms can work together to develop a pretty good quality appraisal. Google treats inter-page links as votes, and uses them, with no actual understanding of the page contents, to evaluate the quality and decide where to rank it in search results. I think Google has also demonstrated that humans alone are not up to dealing with the volume that steemit hopes to achieve. Would anyone seriously suggest that Google's bots (algorithms) should be entirely replaced by human curators?
In my opinion, then, the goal at steemit should be to create the conditions where humans and bots become symbiotic neighbors. So I ask, does evolutionary biology offer any insights into what those conditions might be? I certainly don't know, but it might be an interesting topic to learn about.