People are inherently short-sighted and selfish. We know we should exercise more and eat well but we also want that piece of chocolate cake right now. Our future self is just as much a stranger as anyone else and so we put their thoughts and feelings out of our minds and continue to indulge. It’s why it’s so hard for people to make smart decisions and enact Climate Change policies that could benefit future generations and our futures selves. We’re only concerned with our current selves. But talking to a future version of ourselves could help change that. Motivating us to act better now.
Singularity Hub sums it up best:
“Chatbots are now posing as friends, romantic partners, and departed loved ones. Now, we can add another to the list: Your future self.
MIT Media Lab’s Future You project invited young people, aged 18 to 30, to have a chat with AI simulations of themselves at 60. The sims—which were powered by a personalized chatbot and included an AI-generated image of their older selves—answered questions about their experience, shared memories, and offered lessons learned over the decades.
In a preprint paper, the researchers said participants found the experience emotionally rewarding. It helped them feel more connected to their future selves, think more positively about the future, and increased motivation to work toward future objectives.
‘The goal is to promote long-term thinking and behavior change,’ MIT Media Lab’s Pat Pataranutaporn told The Guardian. ‘This could motivate people to make wiser choices in the present that optimize for their long-term wellbeing and life outcomes.’
Chatbots are increasingly gaining a foothold in therapy as a way to reach underserved populations, the researchers wrote in the paper. But they’ve typically been rule-based and specific—that is, hard-coded to help with autism or depression.
Here, the team decided to test generative AI in an area called future-self continuity—or the connection we feel with our future selves. Building and interacting with a concrete image of ourselves a few decades hence has been shown to reduce anxiety and encourage positive behaviors that take our future selves into account, like saving money or studying harder.
Existing exercises to strengthen this connection include letter exchanges with a future self or interacting with a digitally aged avatar in VR. Both have yielded positive results, but the former depends on a person being willing to put in the energy to imagine and enliven their future self, while the latter requires access to a VR headset, which most people don’t have.
This inspired the MIT team to make a more accessible, web-based approach by mashing together the latest in chatbots and AI-generated images.”
Apologies to all the AI girlfriends out there but the future me might be my new favorite chatbot. And it’s not just because it’s about me. There’s defintely real value here in talking to a future version of yourself to help you make better financial decisions, eat healthier, make better choices, and take better care of yourself. Helping to bridge the temporal gap between future value and maximizing current present day value.
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Is the Future You chatbot the Greatest Idea Ever?
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