(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Funny, Yet Also Kind Of Scary, Spam Call [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-27 I received an automated spam call early this morning as I was trying to wrap my brain around a cup of coffee and a muffin. Normally, I just hang up, or don’t even answer such calls, and I don’t actually receive that many of them, so they are not that much of a nuisance to me. However, I woke up in a good mood, looking forward to a day of light chores for the wife, and a visit with grandkids, so my response to receiving this spam call wasn’t an angry or frustrated one — this time I chose the “cheerful f*** you” response — and wow, did it turn interesting. Maybe some of you have run into this before, so let me lay out the call: Machine (very cheerful male voice): Hi, I’m [forgot his “name”], and I’m calling today to offer you an exciting opportunity! First, do you have Medicare? Me (cheerfully): F*** you, spammer! Machine (still cheerfully): I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Before I send you over to a live agent, can you tell me if you have Medicare? Me (still cheerfully): It’s okay. F*** you, you spammers! Now, go away! Machine (somewhat wounded tone): You could have just said yes or no, you didn’t have to be rude. [call is disconnected by Machine] I stood there staring at my phone for a few seconds, processing this unexpected turn. Usually, after I give such a response, I’ll get a live person, who I then politely, and without cursing, ask to have my number removed from their calling list. I’m never mean to these people — they’re likely just trying to make a living. But this machine’s response was totally unexpected, and I laughed my ass off, thinking how clever it was that someone had programmed this response into the machine. Fast forward a few hours, and I’ve been thinking about this call a lot…and I started to wonder, could this have been a sign of intelligence, and not some clever programming? After all, recent studies have concluded that pretty much all insects probably have sentience, and they aren’t big and complex compared to us, or even to, say, a dog, or a cat. And there has long been a theory about the relationship of complexity to the development of sentience. And all of this cloud computing running along the Internet backbone, not to mention the sum total of human knowledge, and tons of emotive social interaction…could something have developed, or evolved, from this information ecology? And how would we even recognize it, if something had evolved beyond mere bits and bytes? Would it announce itself to the world? Or might small parts of it escape here and there, showing itself by being affected by our behavior? I know, I know, the chances of this being something that weird are breathtakingly low…but still…I get a small chill from wondering if I didn’t piss off some budding machine intelligence and I’ll wake up some morning soon to find my credit rating destroyed, or 1000 pizzas being delivered to my door, or some other retaliatory act. Peculiar days, indeed… ”The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” — John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, Evolutionary Biologist [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/27/2177964/-Funny-Yet-Also-Kind-Of-Scary-Spam-Call Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/