How do I live my best life? I’ll consult a painting, thanks – not my smug ‘AI future self’ | Viv Groskop

Really, what can these chatbots developed by researchers at MIT teach us that Tolstoy or Lucian Freud can’t?

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?

Viv Groskop is a comedian and author of Happy High Status: How to Be Effortlessly Confident

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