In Ten Years or Less – Your Personal VAE (Virtual Alter Ego)

In ten years or maybe less, we will all have virtual alter egos .

They will remember our dreams at night and tell us what they were. If we want to know.

They will give a new meaning to the expression BFF – best friends forever. Really forever.

We will be able to see them as holograms. We’ll be able to choose what they look like to us – ourselves, a famous sage from history, a favorite animal, or a star from a real or fantasy film (this might be a premium feature).

And of course, we can turn them off or on at will. Or perhaps they will ‘know’ when it’s time to turn themselves off.

Alter egos speak when you feel like listening, and do a lot of listening when you go on and on (like I am now).

If you want to sing a Whitney Houston song, your alter ego will whip up a virtual guitar, and accompany you while you sing. In your key. Oh, and store the recording for the two of you to listen to later.

Your alter ego taps continually into your biology, of course. It knows when you’re tired, when your most alert. It tells you jokes while you drive to keep you up, and tells you when you begin to nod off. It is in constant touch with the alter virtual egos of your physicians keeps them up to date with your health and needs.

Virtual alter egos know what you have to do to get the most out of your life.

They chart for you a kind of ‘lifelong waze’. What would you like most in life? What is your destiny? To be wealthy, famous, a family man (or the opposite of a family man)? How will you get there? Your alter ego will offer you alternate routes to your destination.

Your alter ego may offer you an education. “Here’s a book (brief of course) that you might want to read.” Your alter ego can put together an academic degree for you to learn, based on your strengths and interests. And while you can attend a regular university or college, you can get accreditation based on the internet courses that your alter ego has put together for you .

Your alter ego might tell you, “There’s this person you might want to meet. Hey, I know his alter ego – want me to try to set something up? Then the alter egos see if there is enough mutually beneficial ‘fit’ to set up a real meeting.

This will be the case for professional meetings, as well as first dates. Why should you waste your time when the VAE’s can sort it on on their own.

And when you physical body dies (I don’t believe in the prediction of Singularity that our physical bodies will live forever), our virtual alter egos can go on posting on whatever VAE social posting will look like in ten years.

Oh yes, and one more thing. The virtual alter egos will eventually make the web obsolete. The people who developed HTML5 once laughed at me when I asked them what will replace the web. They didn’t even understand the question. But my VAE will.