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Spam Will Herald In A New Age
According to New Scientist, A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an “effectively perfect” method for blocking spam.
Sure, it will work “perfectly” for about 2 days, until the spam-hackers change their methods to work around it. This is an arms race; there is no “final solution.”
…Or is there?
Spam is a massively profitable industry, and spam prevention is not. This incentivizes some of the smartest people on the planet to create new technologies. Innovation is always good, even if its in something annoying, because eventually everyone will reap the benefits.
We keep pushing the requirements for spam further and further up the computational totem pole and you get closer and closer to a point where hackers are going to have to create strong AI to write spam. If they fail (they don’t), we don’t have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! It’s a win-win.
Strong AI
But if individual rights aren’t related to human genetics, but rather to an organisms sapience, allowing spam-hackers to create beings who should be treated as citizens but are actually used as slave labor is wrong.
By the time that happens, whoever makes the real breakthrough will probably feel very emotionally close to his creation, and would its not telling what would happen then. What would he program it to do? What would the bot program itself to do?
Killing these new type of viruses won’t be any different than the biological life we are familiar with. You block lines of communication between essential elements, or infect the bot itself with another virus. In the future, we’d even learn to encompass these sapient programs or virii to carry out specific tasks… perhaps to block spam.
Lineage: Slashdot <- NewScientist