An interesting speculation from Charlie Stross (who needs to be on silk) - I've seen versions of this idea before, but this is probably the best articulated.
excerpted from http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made-out-of-meat.html Spam is everywhere. About 92-95% of all email traffic is spam. Every new communications medium that opens up on the internet succumbs rapidly to spam, unless it is designed with such heavy filtering in place that it's almost impossible to send a message to someone else without prior approval. But new communications media don't get adopted unless they're useful — and one of the key uses of a communications medium is to allow strangers with useful information to get in touch. Spam, almost by definition, isn't useful: but it tries to masquerade as meaningful communication. In the bad old days of email, just about everything anybody sent would eventually get delivered to a mailbox, if it was correctly addressed. When the "anybody" using the internet expanded sufficiently to include unscrupulous advertisers and scam artists, the utility of email began to drop. The solution that eventually turned up was the widespread adoption of filters — software that attempts to determine whether an inbound message is unsolicited rubbish, or something potentially of interest to a human recipient. There are a vast number of ways of filtering. One of the most effective is to look for patterns in the mail stream; an identical message sent to a million people is almost certainly spam unless it emanates from a well-known mailing list system. Unique messages are less likely to be spam. So looking for huge deluges of identikit mail worked for a while — until the spammers took to appending random snippets of text to each individual message, to make them look different. Another filtering technique is to look at the word or letter frequency of the message; purely on a statistical level, spam doesn't look like part of a conversation (unless your correspondents regularly interrupt the flow of discourse to shout BUY CHEAP DESIGNER HAND-BAGS or similar). But again: spam is big business — it's a very effective form of mass advertising — and the spammers are ingenious. As filters get more sophisticated, the spammers are abandoning old-style broadcast advertisements and are moving to much more tightly targeted ads, addressing the recipient by name and attempting to pitch selectively. The most tightly targeted spam is created for spear phishing attacks (in which specific personal information is used to target selected individuals — usually for identity theft or corporate espionage). Today, this is labour intensive: but it's a fair bet that as more of us place more information about ourselves online, spear phishing techniques will gradually become automated, and targeted junk internet advertising will rise to levels of sophistication we can barely guess at. There's lots of money in spam (these days it's a branch of organized crime), and where there's money, talent can be hired. We are currently in the early days of an arms race, between the spammers and the authors of spam filters. The spammers are writing software to generate personalized, individualized wrappers for their advertising payloads that masquerade as legitimate communications. The spam cops are writing filters that automate the process of distinguishing a genuinely interesting human communication from the random effusions of a 'bot. And with each iteration, the spam gets more subtly targeted, and the spam filters get better at distinguishing human beings from software, in a bizarre parody of the imitation game popularized by Alan Turing (in which a human being tries to distinguish between another human being and a piece conversational software via textual communication) — an early ad hoc attempt to invent a pragmatic test for artificial intelligence. We have one faction that is attempting to write software that can generate messages that can pass a Turing test, and another faction that is attempting to write software that can administer an ad-hoc Turing test. Each faction has a strong incentive to beat the other. This is the classic pattern of an evolutionary predator/prey arms race: and so I deduce that if symbol-handling, linguistic artificial intelligence is possible at all, we are on course for a very odd destination indeed — the Spamularity, in which those curious lumps of communicating meat give rise to a meta-sphere of discourse dominated by parasitic viral payloads pretending to be meat ... -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
