Why spam will revolutionize tech By now, the whole business resembles a planet wide reverse Turing test. Instead of human arbiters deciding whether their interlocutor is man or machine, uncountable thousands of filtering robots anxiously scan gigabytes of chatter to fish out the spawn of their evil cousins. It turns out that the only way to be sure whether something is spam is to look at it like a human, with all our knowledge of context, language, meaning and intent. In short, you must be truly intelligent to do the job. Suddenly, the mildly moribund field of AI has a real job to do: saving the world.