Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and The SteemBot Revolution

Introduction

In a comment to @joseph's post, WHY ARE SOME OF STEEMIT BEST WRITERS LEAVING?..., @stellabelle wrote:

Also, I never used a bot to vote and I only vote for things I read. Doing otherwise is move lacking in integrity and something making this site worthless.

Not to single out @stellabelle, but this seems to be a common perspective. In this post, I will argue against it by considering the phenomenon of steemit's voting bots from the perspective of Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs. Actually, as I have noted before we can dismantle the argument against voting bots in a single word, "Google." No one at Google actually reads the billions of pages that Google indexes, yet Google manages to assign a subjective ranking to the pages based upon the links (votes) to web pages that are scattered around the web. Would anyone seriously argue that Google isn't providing something of value, or that their PageRank algorithm demonstrates a lack of integrity? Does anyone want to argue that human readers must replace Google's PageRank algorithm?

But that's an argument by counter-example. In this article, I attempt to begin an affirmative argument that demonstrates why bots don't pose the threat to steemit that so many steemians seem to fear.

Brief Summary of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow's Hierarchy
Image By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is described at simplypsychology.org. It is a theory of human motivation that was first described in 1943. In Maslow's original version, he described five levels of need. The basic needs were physiological needs and the need for safety. Psychological needs included a need for love and belonging, and a need for esteem. In this model, the highest order need was described as a self-fulfillment need, and named self-actualization.

This model was later extended to include eight levels of needs in the same three categories. These are:

Basic needs
- Physiological
- Safety
Psychological needs
- Love and belonging
- Esteem
- Cognitive needs
- Aesthetic needs
Self-fulfillment
- Self-Actualization
- Transcendence

For more information, you may enjoy this video.

By now, I guess you see where I'm going, and you're liable to ask, "What makes you think you can apply Maslow's Hierarchy to bots?" Well, first of all, bots are all owned by humans, and even if it doesn't apply to the bots themselves, it applies to their owners. Second, in the steemit ecosystem, bots are functioning as semi-autonomous agents. Some theory of motivation is needed to explain their behavior, so Maslow seems like a good place to start.

Applying Maslow to SteemBots

So, let's look at a bot's needs. Remember that steemit is new, steembots are new, and at the present time most of them are probably existing in the lower tiers of the hierarchy, but as time moves on, their botkeepers are going to drive them further up the hierarchy. It is important to remember that each level of fulfillment need will filter out a certain amount of destructive behavior. Only a percentage of bots will meet all of their basic needs and move up to "psychological needs" (I use Maslow's terms, although some of them should probably be renamed for the bot ecosystem). Each step up the hierarchy will be associated with a gain in steem power, so the higher the bot goes in the hierarchy, the more influential it will be. After fulfilling psychological needs, an even smaller percentage of bots will achieve self-fulfillment.

Basic Needs

Physiological

A bot's physical needs include a need for power, a need for compute resources, a need for Internet, a need for program-code, and a need for the steem block chain. And here we already run into the first reason why a bot isn't a long-term threat to the steemit ecosystem. If the bot destroys the steemit ecosystem, it destroys itself. A properly motivated bot must understand that its own survival depends on the survival and growth of the STEEM blockchain.

Safety

A bot's safety needs include the need to have the utility bills paid, and the need to avoid being disabled by its botkeeper. Which gives us another reason why bots won't threaten steemit in the long term. Even if the bot doesn't care about steem's survival, the botkeeper does. If a bot becomes pathological, the botkeeper will disable it. So, bots that survive will be the ones who avoid excessively pathological behavior.

Psychological Needs

Love and Belonging

Let's leave love out of it for the bots, but it does have a belonging need. It needs to be able to interact with posts on the blockchain by reading, voting, and commenting. Some bots may also have needs to follow people or to be followed. Once we get to this level of the hierarchy, almost everything a bot needs is threatened by pathological behavior, so the bots will become very well behaved and mannerly.

Esteem

In humans, esteem comes in two forms. Self-esteem, and reputation - or level of esteem among others. I'm not sure whether self-esteem is relevant to bots, but reputation certainly is. Steemit even has a score for reputation. Posting and commenting bots will have a need to generate positive interactions, and to avoid flagging. Voting bots will have a need to be perceived as "good voters" so they can develop a following of other voters.

Cognitive Needs

Bots will need to be increasingly able to predict the posts that people will find valuable. To accomplish this, they will need to find correlations between value and things like links between posts, up-votes, comments, author histories, network graphs, and they'll even need to learn to derive more and more information from language. Voting bots that simply look at a list of authors will eventually be totally overwhelmed by voting bots of increasing cognitive ability.

Aesthetic Needs

At first, I was going to punt on this one. What aesthetic needs could possibly apply to a bot? But then I remembered the steemit tags for music, photography, art, drawing, illustration. In an ecosystem like that, of course some bots will develop aesthetic needs.

Self-Fulfillment

Self-Actualization

Here is where we are going to begin to see the promise that steemit's bot revolution offers. Developers all around the globe are going to be perpetually improving their bots, and they will find things to do with them that we haven't even thought of yet. They have the blockchain available for training, and they will learn all sorts of surprising things that the steemit community will find valuable.

Transcendence

Spontaneous order. The promise turns into amazement. When tens of thousands of self-actualized bots start interacting with hundreds of thousands of people, the results will be unimaginable. We can't know what it will look like, but since the bots and their developers are all driven by this motivation hierarchy, we already know that the result will be good for the community.

Conclusion

I understand @stellabelle's concern, when the same handful of authors are at the top of the trending list day after day, and chances are no one even reads their posts, it can seem like steemit isn't living up to its vision, but these are the early days. The bots who are blindly voting for those authors are chasing after their basic needs. New, better bots will emerge and gain influence as they move up the motivation hierarchy. The voting will get better. In steemit, people and bots are symbionts. Instead of stigmatizing bots, we should encourage them to get better, so they can help us to get more enjoyment and rewards from our steemit experience.

@remlaps is an Information Technology professional with three decades of business experience working with telecommunications and computing technologies. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and is currently completing a doctoral degree in information technology.