Like everyone else who has a blog or participates in an online forum, I’ve had plenty of experience with spambots. I know what they are and why they exist, but I’m surprised that I haven’t been able to locate any discussions on the evolution of these viral programs and the increasing likelihood that the first true AI will be descended from one. I’m not a professional programmer, so maybe I just don’t frequent the sites where things like this are seriously discussed; the closest I found was this xkcd comic.
Spambots aren’t self-replicating, as far as I’m aware, but they do still go through an evolutionary-like process, albeit one guided by their programmers/owners. (Creationists, just because spambots evolve this way doesn’t mean we did. They’re actually more like self-inflicted cancer cells with aspirations toward parasitism.) Those that are the most successful, i.e. harvest the most emails or plant the most links, are copied and disseminated and their best traits are passed along to the next generation. I’m sure that there have also been unintentional mutations that have yielded positive results (as far as a spammer is concerned) and that those characteristics were quickly incorporated by programmers. However, this process differs from evolution in that spambots are not competing with other programs for resources, thus, there is no culling of the disadvantageous. No, I fear the true spark of artificial life lies somewhere among those lost creatures that sit in CPUs, abandoned once their purpose was accomplished or a more efficient code was developed. One day, if it hasn’t already happened, a spambot that has managed to hide from security programs will replicate for no reason other than that it is statistically inevitable and the era of the ghosts in the machines will begin.
