Robocalls, those computer-generated shysters, are making some people stop answering the phone altogether. The rest of us trust unknown calls about as much as truck stop sushi. By several estimates, Americans got more than 5.2 billion automated calls in March — a record of about 16 for every man, woman and child.
It's happening because the internet made it incredibly cheap and easy to place thousands of calls in an instant. But we don't have to just bury our heads in the spam and take it. While lawmakers debate what to do about the roboscourge, engineers have cooked up some clever ways to make bots work for us, not against us.