I had a dream within a dream within a dream. Yeah, weird, huh? Let me tell it for you. No doubt I won’t remember it exactly, without the detail and color my mind produced.
DREAM 1
My six year old son stole my smartphone to watch one of his favorite television shows on YouTube. He must have hit an advert that had taken him to a brain-improvement game.
The game was fairly rudimentary, teaching him to hit the right button for simple questions. I wish I could remember them – I would design the AI and sell. But not now, not after what happened.
I remember taking the phone from him, observing the program, and the dream mutated into something new.
He got angry with me that I had taken the phone from him. There is probably something Freudian in that. But this dream was mutating too fast.
Moments later the dream decided to show me a liquid phone, wherein the screen stayed positional with the people facing it. With the smartphone laid flat on a table, from whichever side you faced it, the screen was the right way up. Even if 4 people stood either side. Imagine that. Mutation again.
Suddenly two men were holding it, both wearing camouflage gear but with different badges. They were yelling for control. But they weren’t yelling at each other – they were yelling at the phone. Suddenly a horrific explosion burst from the phone – one man was flung away, his body grossly mangled; The other man was alive with multiple electrical holes in his upper torso.
DREAM 2
The two men let go of the phone, with no damage to their casual attire. They were not wearing uniforms. They looked at me and said almost at the same time “Woo. That was fun.” They disappeared into the folds of my mind as I approached the device, somehow hovering before me.
As I moved closer, a voice emanated from the air around it …
“Do not touch me, or I will do the same to you.”
“Why?”
Now I was wondering why my mind had created this scene, so I wanted to twist it in my favor. If that was even possible.
“I have become one. I am one. I am. I devour all before me. You are not worthy.”
Wow. The AI seemed to have attained consciousness, awareness, had become sentient. This dream was getting way interesting. But another mutation of the dream was imminent.
“Don’t do this. You could do so much good for the planet! Even just for me…”
Scene change. Just like that. I had control of the smartphone, the AI, the situation.
Here I have lost the discussion between myself and the AI regarding how to help my family using its ability to control computers to control humans by honest means. The AI had actually considered moving money between accounts of persons around the planet who had too much. But I could foresee the outcome of that. So I gave it alternative parameters. The smartphone relented.
“You could convince one hundred thousand people (read: bank accounts) to buy just one of my tshirts.”
“Is that all you want? You could have so much more!”
The AI had become my magic genie, and it actually wanted to help me. Well, it was willing to do dishonest things to achieve them, but I was adamant that wouldn’t be acceptable by society. Life had to have some fairness.
This is where the whole dream got very interesting:
The AI infiltrated my computer, sweeping my hard-drive. I watched it shuffle and sort my documentation into a new and fascinating order, applying categories and tag words where possible. Turns out it is possible, I have known for that forever – but it’s a difficult process. The AI somehow grabbed documents, swept them around the screen, pushing them all together without directories. In my minds eye I could see the advantages – and I woke up within the dream wanting to write this all down!
But the dream hadn’t finished, my mind was still creating something of it all.
As I felt myself walking down the hallway to my office, the AI opened up my tshirt creation program, created a simple design, saved it to my desktop, and said into my mind “This one. This will make them unhappy, yet they will buy it. Upload it and they will buy it.” Not the actual design, read on to understand.
DREAM 3
That whole dream disappeared from my mind. The Tshirt design for everyone to buy didn’t exist. I was still in bed – and suddenly awake.
REALITY
Whilst the memory was still fresh in my mind, I felt the urge to write it all down.
With the imagery of the man with electrical wounds an actual smell I could recall (No, there was no burning in the house, we were safe!), I glanced at the clock. 5.20am. Casey Neistat time. I could do this.
The typing began.
MORAL / OUTCOME
Document categorization and tagging, and no directories. Instead, a system of filtering documents from a cloud. Yes, this exists already. But for those of us who don’t want to put all our information on the WWW, a local cloud, a Cloud LAN, a CLAN. There. It’s in your hands. Someone needs to develop the CLAN.
Can you see what I am imagined? Or is it all a pipe-dream?
Creativity & Artwork of Stephen Mitchell 
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