We don't need to kill the bots (that's not really possible in a decentralized, censorship free platform) All other services are full of them, difference is that Steem lets you earn for activity, so there's more incentive for bot operators to run them.
What we could do is to make proof of brain great again.
HF21 will give us a chance (to curate great content economically competitive to self-voting / vote-selling, to downvote mediocre content that was boosted by bots, etc)

PS
Come to SteemFest :-)