Meet your future self, powered by prompt engineering

Have you ever written a letter to your future self? The theory goes, this type of “future self-continuity” exercise helps us to emotionally invest in our own stability and swap short-term impulses for smarter choices with long-term outcomes. But that’s yesterday’s news. Today, personal scenario planning is getting an upgrade, as behavioral scientists are turning to generative AI to build an alternative: interactive personas that age your face, analyze your personal goals and let you have a real-time video chat with an avatar of the person you’ll be 30 years from now. SN’s Sujata Gupta fills in the edges.

⌛ Time travel without the DeLorean

The theory of future self-continuity posits that people who feel closely connected to their imagined older selves naturally save more money, make healthier choices and exhibit less anxiety. Recently, researchers at the MIT Media Lab upgraded this psychological toolkit by combining advanced face-aging models, real-time animation tools and sophisticated LLMs. When participants spent just seven to 10 minutes conversing with AI-generated versions of their future self, they gained clarity on their core values and felt significantly more empowered to commit to long-term paths. There’s a disheartening caveat though: In a different study that involved only ChatGPT, hypothetical personas that prompts described as having higher socioeconomic status were encouraged to take more risks, and those with less money were advised to play it safe.