'There is another theory which states that this has already happened' -- DNA<p>Stross says: 'I have a gut feeling that the reason we're so communicative is that we are, at a very fundamental level, a communication phenomenon'<p>If spamming can be described very broadly as being an attempt to get other people to do something beneficial to yourself without guaranteeing a benefit to them equal to their expenditure, you could also use this as one functional description of human communication <i>in general</i>. (If you look at the transactions involved instead of the information, this applies to everything from hunting antelope to building the LHC.) In other words, there are already meat-based spambots whose susceptibility to spam (we have needs) helps them develop their own spamming techniques.<p>And later: 'there are other routes to a Vingean Singularity. Augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence, is one such route'<p>The classic sci-fi question that emerges from this is 'Which (meat or silicon) is augmenting which?' And if augmentation is such an obvious idea to humans, why would software-based spam systems simply accept <i>their</i> natural handicap in Turing tests rather than integrate meat-based features (e.g. Mechanical Turk, social networking)?<p>Probably the clearest example of this is in SEO, in which 'predator' software is designed to produce large quantities of pseudo-human communication: both 'content' and activity traces such as hyperlinking, all in order to manipulate 'prey' software (SEs) into doing favours, in the form of high rankings. Humans are involved in the chain as article writers, captcha solvers, comment spammers, retweeters, blogger-reviewers etc. but the start and end of the chain, from keyword discovery to conversion analysis, are highly machine-centric.