Wall Street Journal's The Future Of Everything Festival

The Future of Everything is a podcast series hosted by the Wall Street Journal where an extraordinary intersection of ideas, industries, and innovators come together for dynamic discussions. Leading up to their festival each spring, their events are where business leaders with an eye on emerging trends can look around the corner at what—and who—is creating seismic shifts in how we live, work, and play.

Future You: A Conversation with an AI-Generated Future Self

In this project through a series of questions, an AI creates a future version of yourself that you can converse with. From the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with KBTG, UCLA, and Harvard University.

Future You is an interactive AI platform that allows users to chat with a relatable yet virtual version of their future selves in real time. The conversation with the future self is generated in real-time via a large language model that has been personalized based on a pre-intervention survey assessing user future goals and personal qualities. The language model uses the input data from the survey to create a synthetic memory of the user's future self, similar to a backstory of the user at age 60. Using the User's Input Interface, they obtain information about who the user is in the present and who they want to become in the future. In order to generate an accurate and well-rounded future self, it is crucial to construct an intermediate emulation for the future self to have a believable story for the path the user has taken. Their research explores how having a conversation with an AI-generated future self affects the user's negative and positive affect, optimism for the future, agency towards goals, perceived life satisfaction, future-oriented financial/health decisions, and future self-continuity.

Credit:

• Pat Pataranutaporn, MIT
• Kavin Winson, KBTG
• Peggy Yin, Harvard University
• Auttasak Lapapirojn, KBTG
• Monchai Lertsutthiwong, KBTG
• Hal Hershfield, UCLA
• Pattie Maes, MIT