I could see this technology used for the bootstrapping of highly emergent MMO game worlds. It could be used to populate a world with fake "player" NPCs that are actually part of a simulated online ecosystem. Give the NPCs a large enough population, such that players cannot exert significant selection pressure, but give the NPCs real selection pressure through interaction with artificial life evolved with Genetic Algorithms. The rate of evolution of the a-life and the NPCs could be tuned to provide a comfortable rate of change for the human players, and the NPCs would insulate the players from the frustrations GAs might cause.
League of legends for example has bots appear in PvP games.
While these bots are not produced by the game's developers not a lot was done then to get rid of these things. I guess they were tolerated since it just make the queue times smaller for human players.
Well, Riot solved that by getting rid of Dominion. ;) But seriously, they were mainly present in the game mode mentioned, and now in Co-Op vs AI, just because they want to level the account and sell it. Doesn't really affect the majority of the population until selling point, and once it's been sold, it's easy to tell a botted account.
Bots has come a long way through Guild Wars where they were basically fancy scripts to inducing AI in the start to becoming chatbots and having bots capable to do elite areas with teams "undetected" (knew the person within the guild, slipped up on guildrun using multiple instances of ghosts in ts). There was also pvp (different bots) bots that can/could do alot more than predetermined patterns.
In pve they became so common that the game economy became completely based off them (without the majority's knowledge).
The intelligence of other bots/programs to give a player an unfair advantage of some sort has also come an awfully long way. One example is the leaps the aimbot took in Halo PC, from being easy to detect even when used by top players to being nearly indetectible (except when priority issues or other bugs/glitches appear).
Or even some kind of "Always online" MMO like chronicles of elyria. Being able to just tell your character to play while you are away without 'scripting' them would be nice.
