Back to the… present?

Fancy a chat with Future You?

The folks at MIT have built a chatbot that can simulate an older version of you—complete with aged-up photo—to help talk through life choices on money, health, all those “I’ll do it tomorrow” decisions. 

Exciting, right! While giving a voice to our older self might be like inventing a pet speech decoder (interesting, but we might hear some things we’d rather not…!) it’s pretty cool to see research ideas brought to life, and seeing your future self as a concrete, current person is a great way to encourage long-term thinking.  

Studies on retirement savings have shown that when presented with an aged-up image of themselves, people are more likely to save for the future vs seeking immediate rewards.

And it goes deeper still — research has even shown that our grammar has an influence. 

If the language we speak has a separate future tense*, as it does in English, we are more likely to prioritise immediacy.

So by bringing this ‘future us’ kicking and screaming into the present tense, we may rethink how we make decisions.

I’d love to see pension savings reimagined as buying a round for our future selves.

Though I guess that would be best done behind the chatbot’s back, given they’d probably suggest we ordered a soda water…

*i.e. ‘It will rain tomorrow’ (English) vs ‘it rains tomorrow’ (German)