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Researchers with the MIT Media Lab Research Consortium and their international collaborators have come up with a way, using artificial intelligence (AI), for people to have conversations with older versions of themselves.
The project, called Future You, generates real-time conversations with a person’s future self using “a large language model that has been personalized based on a pre-intervention survey assessing user future goals and personal qualities.”
The researchers explained the details and of the project and the impact it has had in a paper published to the preprint database arXiv.
“Those who can imagine their future selves vividly, regard their future selves positively, or consider their future selves to be similar to their present self exhibit a strong sense of future self-continuity, the degree of connectedness one feels with a temporally distant future self,” the researchers state in their report.
“In emerging field of study on future self-continuity has shown that high future self-continuity promotes better saving behavior, academic performance, mental health, and subjective quality of life.”
Studies have shown that using methods like letter writing, method acting, and virtual reality (VR) simulations can reduce anxious and overwhelming feelings.
“However, these interventions require individuals to deeply reflect upon potentially ambiguous core identities or actively imagine a version of themselves that they have not yet experienced—tasks that can be particularly challenging given that humans are naturally biased toward the preferences of our present selves,” the researchers explained.
“The system makes the simulation very realistic. Future You is much more detailed than what a person could come up with by just imagining their future selves,” said Pattie Maes, MIT professor and one of the creators of the project.
To help people visualize their future selves, the system generates an age-progressed photo of the user. The chatbot is also designed to provide vivid answers using phrases like “when I was your age,” so the simulation feels more like an actual future version of the individual.
The ability to take advice from an older version of oneself, rather than a generic AI, can have a stronger positive impact on a user contemplating an uncertain future…
The researchers claimed in a press release that “participants who used Future You were able to build a closer relationship with their ideal future selves, based on a statistical analysis of their responses. These users also reported less anxiety about the future after their interactions.”