Smarter spam might serve a valuable purpose: protecting privacy on the Internet. One of the smartest things the RIAA (may their souls rest in eternal torment) has ever done was flooding the P2P networks with 'fake' or corrupted versions of popular songs. Horrible, but brilliant. Once the networks were filled with their fake versions it was very difficult for people to use them.
The same principle could apply to privacy on the net in general. If the net were flooded with fake websites, complete with fake posts and threads, using real people's names, it would make tracking people much more difficult. A company that's been slandered on a couple mesage boards could create a million more message boards -- with good, bad, and indifferent messages. Then they could point to the whole set and say, "All these criticisms are ridiculous!"
If I wanted to change my online persona, I could have a hundred fake Tom Daltons go do things online, so it was impossible to tell what was really me and what was just another digital, false shadow.
Not that I'm convinced that privacy is really the direction the net needs to go. But that's another story another.