Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat
mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered
to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media
and their application is even suspected to be partly responsible for recent
election results. Astonishingly, the term `Social Bot' is not well defined and
different scientific disciplines use divergent definitions. This work starts
with a balanced definition attempt, before providing an overview of how social
bots actually work (taking the example of Twitter) and what their current
technical limitations are. Despite recent research progress in Deep Learning
and Big Data, there are many activities bots cannot handle well. We then
discuss how bot capabilities can be extended and controlled by integrating
humans into the process and reason that this is currently the most promising
way to go in order to realize effective interactions with other humans.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure
