Wily ones may even become your manager. In the bargain, they're fomenting a revolution in the way goods are marketed and sold in cyberspace. They scour thousands of Web sites for information, compare it with related data, then serve up the results. Get to Work Bots are already used in thousands of money-making ways. Search engines like Yahoo and Excite use them to index Web pages.
Spammers use the electronic serfs to troll the Internet for e-mail addresses.
They can download software, dispatch e-mail, and grab sound bites and images. Others emulate humans. Called chatterbots, they produce some of the more intelligent dialogue in Internet chat rooms these days. But the most promising bots go shopping. The best of these is Jango.