At eight in the morning, sitting on the bus heading to work, Nusrat — a pseudonym — suddenly noticed a tiny pendant hanging from her colleague's neck. It was no piece of jewellery. "What is that?" she asked. Her colleague smiled and said, "It listens to the conversation around me …

A large part of the online world is now ruled by an invisible technology rather than by visible humans. That technology is called a “bot”. Simply put, a bot is a type of software or computer program that can automatically carry out specific tasks without human instruction. Built to imitate …