AI now enters the dreamworld

Summary

As we sleep, today’s technology is featuring in our dreams, showing what AI means to us.

I used to dream alarmingly often of being stuck in some enormous complex of buildings with everyone I know having evaporated. I’m left among a handful of strangers, the day is drawing to a close and it’s turning dark. I don’t know how to get home, from which I’m far away. Somehow, I never think to use my phone and call someone. In fact, smartphones are strangely missing from any of my dreams. I’m amazed to find I’m not the only one to find that this is so.

A dream researcher, Dr Kelly Bulkeley, studied some 16,000 dream narratives and found that smartphones and computers feature in only up to 3.5% of the cases. That’s odd, considering some of us spend the whole day interacting with tech in some way or the other. Interestingly, the same is not true of AI, which has entered our dreams quite rapidly. What does that say about the place AI occupies in our heads?

Waking fears

Our days are now filled with headlines and warnings about AI going rogue, going wrong and escaping human control. Compared with what we are faced with today, yesterday’s AI fears seem trivial. In the earlier days of AI, we worried about it taking out jobs, and quite justifiably. Today, we worry about whether it’s going to take our lives.

Putting AI in charge of the basic systems that allow us to live the lives we do today raises scenarios of what would happen if AI caused a shutdown or failure. A dam’s gates open up, flooding cities; power goes down, bringing everything to a screeching halt; emergency systems refuse to obey humans. You’ve seen the nightmares outlined.

So it isn’t surprising that the fears that make up our days would now seep into our dreams, especially when they centre around the rapidly changing shape of AI.

Not-so-sweet dreams

Meanwhile, the smartphone I spend much of my waking day with still doesn’t make an appearance in my dreams. Somehow, AI has beaten it there.

Mala Bhargava