In the recent movie "Ex Machina," a young programmer falls in love with a robot. An artificial-intelligence mastermind had engineered his robot so that "she" appears to think, feel and love in a way that was uncannily human. He had also mined and analyzed the young man's online history deeply enough to create the woman of his dreams. Long before anybody actually meets the perfect robot mate, however, intelligent, "learning" machines capable of advanced data analytics will be ever more precise in matching one human to another--and in predicting the success of computer-assisted matchups, which will improve the odds that our real-world romantic relationships will last. Leaps in digital technology have already made drastic changes to 21st century romance.

As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. Viv is just four years old, but by the time IoT and VR matures, she will be ready to make the smart home, smart city and billions of connected devices truly come to life. While we assume it will be one of the tech giants: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft; disruption doesn't usually come from an established player whose interests and investments are scattered. Just as VR represents a new platform of information, content, advertisement, marketing and social media, and digital experiences, VPAs like Viv could represent another springboard to the future.

As an amateur futurist, I'm always looking for how AI and exponential technologies are disrupting human society towards more automated smart cities. As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. The future of PVAs is more like an intelligent OS that acts as a buffer between us and the information noise of the internet. Take your most sophisticated contextual chat bot and marry it with millions of data points per person and algorithms learning from us and how we interact online and in our lives, where we can customize our own experience, and that is a bit like how PVAs may turn out. They will be AI, but truly act as personal virtual assistants.

But artificial intelligence isn't some far-off fantasy imagined by a science fiction film-maker or writers. It's here, and only going to get better. From Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 in his 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Samantha, the AI assistant that Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with in Spike Jonze's film Her, humanity has long dreamt of the day it can just talk to its computers. And some very bright people indeed are betting this will be the way we'll all interact with our computers very soon. We've all heard of Siri, of course – Apple's AI assistant, built right into the iPhone and iPad.

The weekend is upon us once again (woohoo!), and after another week packed with updates, announcements, rumors and insights, its arrival is certainly welcome. And as ever, 7 Days is here too, to walk you through what's been happening and bring you up to speed. We begin our odyssey this week in the UK, where the European Commission has blocked Three's proposed 10.25 billion acquisition of O2 UK, which would have created the country's largest mobile network operator. The EC determined that the deal would harm innovation, limit competition, and increase prices across the market. Cloud CRM platform Salesforce suffered an outage earlier this week affecting a relatively small proportion of its customers.

Viv is a new digital AI assistance created by makers of Siri. Since co-founder of the artificial intelligent software Dag Kittlaus announced the news, a lot of people are asking what Viv can do and how is it better than Siri. During a conference at TechCrunch, Kittlaus showed the basic voice commands that drive Viv. However, the digital assistance software is currently in development and does not have the voice capability. Viv responded to some complex questions that demonstrated by Kittlause and it is, in fact, better than Siri at understanding difficult sentence structures.

Messaging is the new battleground among powerful tech companies. Facebook, Snapchat and Microsoft are racing to build ever more powerful chat apps, based on artificial intelligence, virtual assistants and bots. Some industry insiders predict that messaging will become the next big computing platform, providing a new way for consumers to do everything from shop online to reading the news. As Google kicks off its annual developer conference near San Francisco next week, a growing number of users, software developers and analysts think Google needs to get on the ball and make some messaging-based announcements. The company's Hangouts chat app was an early success when it was introduced years ago, but appears to have languished recently. Here's why Google can't afford to ignore the messaging threat: Everyone's talking about how chat is the next big thing.

On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they're interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was lead on the work, replied bluntly: "No. This sentiment is repeated in the accompanying draft paper, "The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users," posted to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal also run by Kirkegaard: Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form. For those concerned about ...

Do we need an Asimov's Law for chatbots? And how do they compare with a talking parrot? What can dairy farmers learn from outfitting cows with pedometers? How can algorithms better explain to humans not just what they're predicting, but why? Some of the biggest names from the Seattle area's growing machine learning and artificial intelligence community tackled these questions and more Wednesday at a Madrona Venture Group summit. The sprawling array of challenges and opportunities in this fast-growing, fascinating, and sometimes frightening field defy easy summary.

The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard, Oliver Nordbjerg, and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used software to automatically scrape profiles and then uploaded it in a set onto the Open Science Framework, a forum and repository for scientists to share data. The info is only slightly anonymous: While no real names are used, usernames are connected with location and answers to the litany of personal questions OkCupid uses to find compatibility. Some of these, like political leanings or feelings about homosexuality, are quite private. As Kirkegaard repeatedly stated on Twitter, the data was indeed publicly available, but the scraping violates the dating site's terms and a possible legal matter, an OkCupid spokesperson told Vox. And, as Vox points out, it's also a breach of ethics according to the American Psychological Association, which states that people involved in research studies have the right to consent.