A new artificial-intelligence tool allowed me to talk to my 80-year-old self. It’s going to be quite a life.

By Heidi Mitchell
Feb. 1, 2025 9:00 pm ET

It turns out I’m going to write a book! It will require years of agony, but I’ll do it. Also, I will retire at 65. Who would have thought this workaholic could hang up her notebook so soon? And I will have six grandchildren. Sadly, I will live in the suburbs; no European city-center loft for me. At least I’ll enjoy that family trip to Thailand that we’ll take with the grandchildren. Oh, and my “passion for creating positive change” will never fade. 

I learned all this from chatting with myself after I’ve turned 80, some 30 years from now.

The glimpse of what’s to come is courtesy of Future You, a new interactive artificial-intelligence platform developed by psychologists, researchers and technologists that allows users to create a virtual older self—a chatbot that looks like an aged version of the person and is based on an AI text system known as a large language model, then personalized with information that the user puts in. The idea is that if people can see and talk to their older selves, they will be able to think about them more concretely, and make changes now that will help them achieve the future they hope for.  

In other words, it’s a chance to look back at your life before you actually live it.

So at 50—an age where there’s plenty of time left to make changes, but you’re just starting to get a glimpse of old age on the horizon—I decided to try it out.

 Like most humans, I have a hard time picturing myself as old; I’m still the person at the concert dancing with abandon near the stage, lower back be damned. I wondered if talking to an AI-generated future self would help me think more clearly about the person I might become. Will I remain me when I’m really old? Where will I find joy? Will I be creative, keep working, find new projects to embrace? Most important, what can I do between now and then to make sure I can find the happiness and fulfillment that I yearn for?

A team effort

The tool is the brainchild of a team that includes MIT Media Lab postdoctorate Pat Pataranutaporn, who studies AI systems that help people flourish. Pataranutaporn had read the work of Hal Hershfield, a marketing psychology professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and author of “Your Future Self,” which looks at how connecting with our future selves affects the decisions we make today. He got in touch with Hershfield, with Peggy Yin, a Harvard undergrad who studies the intersection of psychology and technology, and with software developers at Thailand’s Kasikorn Business-Technology Group, and Future You was launched last year.