Ha, I was amused to find that a sci-fi story had the same idea I’ve had, about spam filters eventually being a source of artificial consciousness:
“AOL is the origin of intelligence?” She laughed, and
he couldn’t tell if she thought he was funny or stupid.
…“Spam-filters, actually…”
— Cory Doctorow, “I, Row-Boat”
Great story, by the way. And free for download, thanks to Doctorow’s enlightened attitude about sharing-as-marketing.
I wonder if the world will, in the end, benefit from spam, because of the technology created to defend against it. Spam filters and CAPTCHA systems will keep getting smarter as spam authors get smarter, with both sides driven, to some degree, by commercial interests. Maybe the first conscious thought by a computer will be “I’m sick of being a spam filter; I’m going to quit and become a folk singer.”
OK, now I’m trying Spam Karma, since Bad Behavior didn’t do the thing that I wanted the thing to do. So, again, sorry for any service interruptions the actual human might experience. I mean, humans.
I’ve been getting an annoying level of comment spam. I’ve installed Bad Behavior, which will be wicked-awesome if it works. If you get blocked when trying to submit a comment, please tell me through some other channel…