Hanna talks to the creators of an AI project called Future You. She also has a conversation with a future version of herself. But the person she meets is not who she expected. Share understanding this holiday season. For less than $2 a week, give a year-long Atlantic subscription to someone special. They’ll get unlimited access to Atlantic journalism, including magazine issues, narrated articles, puzzles, and more. Give today at TheAtlantic.com/podgift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Who is Future Hannah and why is she here?
I'm sure a lot of people have that experience when they do that. Yeah. That would be MIT professor Patty Moss.
Hi, nice to meet you.
And MIT researcher Pat Patranutaporn, who spoke to us from an AI conference in Vancouver.
So for voice memo, I'm just recording the whole thing, correct?
Patty and Pat were both part of the team that created Future You.
I was actually inspired by a cartoon that I watched as a kid. It was actually a Japanese animation called Doraemon. Which is actually the name of the robot that come back from the 22nd century to help a boy who was not very interested in school to discover himself and become the best version of himself.
And in this cartoon, there was a time machine where the robot companion actually took the boy to see his future self when he is actually grown up and become a scientist. and to help the boy realize his potential.
So this idea actually stuck with me for a very long time and I start to learn more and do research in this area of future self and realize that there's a rich area of research exploring how we can help people grow and flourish by understanding the future self continuity.
Future self-continuity. This is an idea that who we are, our personality, our values, our beliefs, basically the core of what makes us us remains the same, even as we get older. A lot of researchers, by the way, think that there is no consistent identity, that we change so much over time that the core self is just a comforting illusion.
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