(2013-06-18) Spam Driven Evolution

I'm currently reading William Hertling's Avogadro Corp (Hertling Singularity Series) and trying to remember where I ran across the idea of the Singularity (Evolution) being driven by Co-Evolution of SpamWars combatants...

Dec'2010: Charlie Stross refers to this as the Spamularity. We have one faction that is attempting to write software that can generate messages that can pass a Turing Test, and another faction that is attempting to write software that can administer an ad-hoc Turing test. Each faction has a strong incentive to beat the other. This is the classic pattern of an evolutionary predator/prey arms race: and so I deduce that if symbol-handling, linguistic artificial intelligence is possible at all, we are on course for a very odd destination indeed — the Spamularity, in which those curious lumps of communicating meat give rise to a meta-sphere of discourse dominated by parasitic viral payloads pretending to be meat ...

XKCD - when? http://xkcd.com/810/

Feb'2011: this comment says: Peter Watts, author of Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth, has an interesting take on Spam and AI in his books. He imagines sentient spambots taking over the net.