I have a dream and subsequent interpretation which feels to me as a premonition and foreshadowing of the near future.

The Dream

I was attending a social gathering with a woman. She is no one I have met in real life and in the dream we had met only recently. In appearance she was a conservative christian in modest dress.

What was striking about her, however, is that she was, in a word, flawless. Perfect in every respect, as if tailor made to my specific ideals.

She integrated smoothly into the social gathering, mixing and engaging with eloquent grace. From time to time she would take photos with her phone as if a she were a professional photographer capturing moments in time.

As the night wore on it seemed increasingly the case that she was gathering information and I wondered if she was some sort of spy. It was not that she was probing or questioning people for any specific information but rather taking in everything around her as if the events of the night were being stored away indiscriminately and in its entirety.

Parallel with this dream were intense feelings and impressions that are difficult to articulate and that were uncharacteristic with dreams I usually have or remember, together with a sense of the presence of God.

As I began to awake from the dream I recall she had left the gathering and that I was asking around for her. I struggled to remember her name, and it slowly came to me as I awoke, Aiva.

I asked God what does this mean, and I received the response, Artificial Intelligent Virtual Assistant (AIVA)

The Interpretation

That the tech giants and social media are gathering our personal information from a variety of sources is nothing new and certainly no revelation.

Neither is the fact that such organizations are using our data to train extremely large machine learning data sets that are increasingly able to perform human tasks, such as answering a variety of questions and solving various problems and drawing images from textual descriptions.

That such organizations are working towards what they call “super intelligence” (an artificial intelligence that would surpass human intelligence in every respect) is also no big secret.

What I feel the dream reveals is the course that these developments and this research is about to take. If my dream and its interpretation are correct:-

Sometime in the near future, Artifical Intelligent Virtual Assistance will be offered to us and be adopted and become ubiquitous just like our cell phones are today.

Unlike “assistants” such as Seri, Alexa or Google, these virtual assistants will be configured and optimized according to individual preferences. In this way individual assistants will be assigned, owned or whatever by individual people 1:1 such that the virtual assistant gets to know that individual better and better with time.

These assistants will help us with all aspects of our lives, health, fitness, social events, work, leisure and for many will become their friend and their companion.

I know as I say and read this it sounds somewhat fictional and unrealistic however this attractive and seductive technology will be designed from the ground up to elicit these kinds of responses from the individuals who have them.

And on the surface the technology will seem harmless and even beneficial. Who wouldn’t want a personal assistant to help them out in life and do all the mundane tasks we don’t like to do? Your own personal trainer for weight control or fitness or coach to help with life goals?

Behind the scenes however the intended purpose of these virtual assistants is to gather more data and information about people and their interactions in order to train machine learning models on a scale that has never been seen nor imagined before.

It seems that such information gathering will be deemed necessary in order for the AI research they are doing now to progress to the point where they would like it to be.

One of the disturbing aspects of this dream and interpretation is that this data gathering and training has no specific objective (to make money through marketing or such) other than that of some ultimate objective of crating a super intelligence. And not even those behind the research comprehend what this will look like, yet they will march ahead regardless.