I'm pretty certain someone has thought of this before, but has anyone imagined the potential of seed AI + an Internet worm?

One of the biggest problems facing AI researchers at present is the computational complexity of the brain: to model all of the neurons in the human brain and their dense connectivity structure would require at least several petaflops of computational power.

The thing is, that's obviously out there now, if a seed AI program could create a botnet of every single computer on the Internet.

The nice thing about a brain is that it scales; many of the structures (including ones assumed to comprise the machinery of consciousness such as the "columns" of the cerebral cortex) are merely slightly variadic repetitions of the same basic pattern.

A seed AI program contained within an Internet worm, armed with a small set of initial exploits to get it going, would take over successively more computers. But unlike other worms its intelligence would increase for each computer it infected and linked back into the global neural network.

It could then start devising its own exploits and taking control of more and more computers, all of which continues to increase its intelligence. Never mind the fact that as a seed AI it's been specifically created as a self-improving algorithm (ala Neuromancer)

I guess the hard part would be hitting the "critical mass" of enough infected hosts for the "Smartworm" to be intelligent enough to begin designing its own exploits and/or self-improving its own intelligence.