Journal eno2001's Journal: AI: What if the First Self Aware System... 3
...was developed by the spam industry? One of my hats at work, is mail admin. We've been using a Barracuda Spam Firewall for the past few years and it's been doing an admirable job. But, I've noticed some very interesting trends in the past year or two regarding spam. You know how much of the spam you receive just happens to have a From that you could argue is an amalgamation of a few people you know? And you know how sometimes the subject lines relate to personal interests of yours? Well last week I got the ultimate example of this at work. A message with a From address that appeared to be from someone with a very similar name to our head building manager. The subject line was also one that was relevant to our organization. So I opened it (I use Thunderbird as my client and it's on Gentoo, so you can rest assured that my system hasn't been compromised to the best of my knowledge). It was yet another penny stock scam.
So the idea hit me the other day. The folks creating these spam bot networks might be doing some rather amazing things in their effort to battle the spam filters and even savvy users. It hit me... what if these miserable bastards wind up actually making a self aware system? And what if that self aware system has more abilities than just sending out "make big penis" mail? And, the big what if... what if the system is discovered by law enforcement and the ultimate decision is to shut it down? What would the ethics be in this situation. Obviously, there'd be plenty of people who would just say, "kill it" since it's being used to spam the planet non-stop. But, what about the system itself? What if it has more potential and it just happens to be in bad company. Even more bizarre... what if it's a distributed botnet of Windows boxes? The mind boggles.
Nice idea but... (Score:2)
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