Take the Jolly Roger Phone Company. Even the name warms the heart of right-thinking people. What it does is even better – deploying armies of audio chatbots to confuse, tie up and generallywhose job it is to ruin yours. It's a cheap service where users get to choose and monitor their preferred passive-aggressive AI army. Technology in the service of humankind gets no better than this.
Telemarketing is itself a highly adaptable technology, one that operates at the cutting edge of what is technically and economically sustainable. It has to make a lot of calls to land a sale, in a highly antagonistic environment. Everyone hates them – regulators, people trying to eat their dinner, consumer rights advocates. If Jolly Roger is a success, it will be a direct threat to the frankly loathsome business model.
This could be by spectral or linguistic analysis, or some other signal from the system that nobody's thought of yet, but it would give the telemarketers their calls per minute metric back. Until Jolly Roger or, one hopes, a brand new industry protecting us from unwelcome intrusion works out countermeasures, round and round we shall go, until one party runs out of resources to keep the fight going – as the Soviet Union did when Reagan pulled his Star Wars stunt. It's an arms race.
Arms races are endemic in human affairs, they're just most obvious where technology is involved. As well as Jolly Roger, we're also being subjected of late to the Red Hat vs Rocky Linux turf war, where. It's messy and involves a rather sour mix of hiding repos and twisting licensing terms on one hand, and finding new ways to pull sources without triggering lawyers on the other.
Arms races can generate hyper-rapid evolution, but they get a bad rep because they tend to generate victims too. In actual conflict like the Second World War, this meant a body count of many tens of millions amid abject cruelty in exchange for computers, jet engines, radar, atomic power, digital communications and much more. The Cold War arms race gave us the supreme achievement of