Would our youthful selves benefit from an encounter with a decrepit and raddled 60-year-old “future you” to give us the push we need to live a better life? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) think so. They are building an AI-powered chatbot using a digitally aged face and “plausible synthetic memories”. “Future You” will tell you to eat your greens, drink less and visit your parents: “The goal is to promote long-term thinking and behaviour change.”
On the surface, I get it. There’s a swath of socio-scientific research – from the Stanford marshmallow test to Kahneman and Tversky’s “sunk cost fallacy” – that proves how poor we can be at planning for the future and that we constantly make illogical decisions that disadvantage us. Most of us have “bird in the hand” thinking. We prefer one tangible marshmallow right now over two promised marshmallows in the future. We constantly throw good money after bad because we would rather keep hoping that one day we’ll be right instead of accepting that – d’oh! – we made a mistake. We are monumental idiots. But is that really our worst trait and one that needs to be corrected by meeting smug Future You? Or is being unoptimised, plodding, self-defeating – and, er, human – perhaps the very best part of us?
Future You is biohacking meets the “carpe diem” message of Dead Poets Society. And that’s what makes it both intrusive and pointless. Intrusive because you can imagine it used to shame people for their life choices: “You had the means to live better. We gave you the information. You still didn’t eat enough broccoli.” Who needs the nanny state when you can be your own nanny?
But also pointless because this is fake progress. We already know everything we need to know about how hopeless and foolish we are because the arts and literature have already been telling us for millennia. Everything we need to know about how to live well and how to live badly; about hubris, regret, ageing, rejection and self-sabotage can be found in any art gallery, library or theatre in the world. Want to converse with your future self? Look at some Lucian Freud portraits. Read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Watch Melisandre taking off her necklace in Game of Thrones.
The great irony, of course, is that just as we are pouring billions into tech and AI and giving these industries tax breaks and kudos, across the western world the arts and humanities are losing funding and prominence, our universities plagued by debt. And all for what? So that we can have our own personalised, self-absorbed bot clone that reflects the hell of the human condition, a hell which we have already brilliantly catalogued. Have we really become so narcissistic that we are turning away from painting and poetry and will only pay attention to holograms of our fake, generic “future selves”? We already know who we are as humans. The last thing we need to do is gaze ever deeper into a simulation of Narcissus’ pool.
Not only are these lessons not new to us, there’s no real proof that endlessly optimising ourselves is going to make us any happier or live any longer. The AI robot is not going to flash up a message that says: “Sorry, you can’t engage with your 60-year-old self because you are going to be run over by a bus tomorrow. Think carefully about your underwear choices.” These technologies plan for a future that may never be coming. And the uniquely human pain – and the tragic comedy – of that realisation is something that only art, literature and music are capable of expressing.
I once did an interview with a youthful podcaster where I was talking about Tolstoy’s attitude to life and longevity and how he deals with that in Anna Karenina. I was arguing that in the novel, by throwing Anna – spoiler alert – under a train, he is killing off the “immoral” part of himself. After that book Tolstoy started afresh and only wrote spiritual works, renouncing the “frivolity” of his earlier novels. The podcaster responded, “Wow. Tolstoy invented #yolo.” (“You only live once”). Well, he no more invented #yolo than this AI bot invented memento mori. The only thing that never gets old is our capacity to delude ourselves: that we can live forever, that we can be more than human, that our ideas are so new and fresh no one has ever thought of them before.
The trouble with #yolo, with our AI future selves and with apps that tell us when to breathe in and breathe out again is that they give the impression that we’re on the verge of some radical discovery, that we have finally “hacked” being human. But it’s all just the same truths artists have been trying to express for centuries.
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