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ONE morning this month, David Pardoe earned himself $4.7 million without lifting a finger. All the hard work was done by a robot. True, it was a robot without a body – a software robot, in fact – but almost a century after the word “robot” was coined, the vision of automaton slaves is at last becoming reality.

Software robots – also known as bots or software agents – can earn hard cash in the real world. They can even outperform people in some tasks, so it makes sense to let them do all the hard work.

In Pardoe’s case, the bots bringing home…

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