What the future awaits for us

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[Stuyvesant]

I think the major issue here is line between artificial intelligence and a program that mimics intelligence. At complex enough levels, I guess these would be pretty hard to tell apart. The distinction is important though.
I mean spam bots are kinda like that cleverbot thing - they're being programmed to mimic human interactions. There is no actual intelligence or will behind these things. Once we hit the point where that does occur, then I guess we'll have finally given birth to AI.
Once that happens, well, your guess is as good as mine. This has been a topic for popular fiction for a while - the evil AI empire or the happy, benevolent overlord.

It is an interesting question though about the spam bots. A lot of forums are filled with weird, cryptic or just plain stupid comments by humans. It won't take much for a spam bot to be able to replace these kinds of people. Just add enough 'lol' comments and they'll do fine. I don't have any issue with the idea that I may confuse a program for a human. The only issue I would have is that given a long enough time period and enough interactions, I would consider someone online as friend. To find out that they only exist as a bunch of code would feel like a betrayal (assuming there was no will/intelligence behind the code).

[morten]

Spam bots are a known cause today. Throughout the years I have been watching them, they developed from blatant advertisers that hack into forums into bots that imitate the realistic behaviour of a real person, posting on a site.
You could say, they are indeed evolving.

Sometimes in the near future, spam bots will be evolved so far that they generate 'artificial intelligence'. It was always assumed that the internet will be the primeval soup for a new artificial life form, not only claimed by science fiction authors. The creators of spam bots will go so far to imitate real life behaviour to make there software work and so create accidentally an intelligent consciousness.

You could say that these already exist today, or how would you justify that there are 500 million people putting out their private data on a website like Facebook?
See, once spam bots will become artificial lifeforms, we will interact with them like they are real people. Or do we already? The question is, what will we do when they will ask us for their creation. Could we tell them that their original purpose in life was to sell us Penis Enlargement Pills? What might be their reaction to this?