There's a lot of discussion on Steem regarding whales. So much in fact, that the #whales section is being flooded with discussions and rapidly growing as I type this.
If you're new to Steem, a whale is someone that holds immense amount of Steem Power. One vote from these whales could lead to very handsome payouts on your posts. To help catch these whales 
But the important discussion that's currently unfolding is how to address the power of these whales. Whales are just people, after all, and are no more immune to manipulation than you or I. In fact, whales could be swayed more easily than you or I since, they would have much more to gain from any kind of backroom negotiation or deals.
If Steem were to reach mainstream, a whale could potentially sell to a large corporation looking to market their products. Whales could start their own suite of products and market those products to the front-page through shear voting power alone. The whales could collude and attempt to promote any content that support their voice and opinions. Whales could even go inactive, and leave the pond a little dry on rewards. Hell, a whale could even croak tomorrow and we wouldn't know about.
Humans are fallible creatures.
So why don't we try something new? What if... hold on to your chairs, some of you will get pissed at this suggestion... what if we turned the biggest whales into bots?
Currently, it's the only way I can think of for removing the "human" out of the voting system. Because really, it's the fact that whales are humans that so many people are unsettled by the whales.
The kind of bot needed is much more complex than what you may be thinking, however. What we need is a "distributed bot." Now, you'll have to excuse me if I'm not making sense, we're getting into territory I'm only vaguely familiar with. If anyone is able to educate me if this is even possible, please do so. What I mean by distributed bot, is a bot that is shared by the whole network.
Imagine this... Steem developers could hold a contest. They could ask developers to submit a logarithmic equation to implement a "whalebot." This whalebot would assign "whalevotes" to posts that were high in popularity. It could have a predetermined amount of votes it would give per day, and would be given at random intervals. Over time, this bot could be refined by the community by opening further requests for improvement of the algorithmic equation. Those improvements and changes would be voted on by us users, so no changes to bot would be made without a community vote.
In addition, the whalevotes would be visible on the post; something like a whale icon or image near the thread title. It would be transparent to the whole community which post the whalebot voted on. Further measures could be taken against the possibility of bot-farming whalevotes by implementing a veto against whale vote.
So in short, this bot would need to be something we all control and have input into its behavior to keep the playing level fair. It could be based on many measures like number of comments, existing votes, length of comments, quality of comments, ect. Of course, there's a downside. This bot would too be exposed to its own special kinds of manipulation. Posting bots could find the sweet spot for getting whale votes constantly, and the network voting system would be jammed with requests to reassigning whale votes.
I realize that my suggestion may arise many technical questions, problems, and barriers. However, I'm sure there's way more knowledgeable and itellignet people out there to strategize a solution. If we really want to have a fair shot at whalevotes, then this is one way to do it.
NOTE:
I personally think that the majority of whales have been behaving rather responsibly and have not posed issues for the community. However, we are also at the infant stage of this platform, so it's not clear as of yet if they will remain behaving responsibly.
Post your comments and let me know just how stupid this idea is =]