
Agritech
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Founded Date December 13, 1951
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Company Description
AI Simulation Gives People a Glimpse of Their Potential Future Self
In an initial user research study, the researchers found that after communicating with Future You for about half an hour, people reported decreased anxiety and felt a more powerful sense of connection with their future selves.
“We do not have a real time maker yet, but AI can be a type of virtual time machine. We can utilize this simulation to assist individuals think more about the consequences of the choices they are making today,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, a recent Media Lab doctoral graduate who is actively developing a program to advance human-AI interaction research at MIT, and co-lead author of a paper on Future You.
Pataranutaporn is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Kavin Winson, a researcher at KASIKORN Labs; and Peggy Yin, a Harvard University undergraduate; in addition to Auttasak Lapapirojn and Pichayoot Ouppaphan of KASIKORN Labs; and senior authors Monchai Lertsutthiwong, head of AI research at the KASIKORN Business-Technology Group; Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences and head of the Fluid Interfaces group at MIT, and Hal Hershfield, teacher of marketing, behavioral choice making, and psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. The research will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Frontiers in Education.
A reasonable simulation
Studies about conceiving one’s future self go back to at least the 1960s. One early method focused on improving future self-continuity had individuals compose letters to their future selves. More recently, scientists made use of virtual reality goggles to assist people imagine future variations of themselves.
But none of these methods were very interactive, limiting the impact they might have on a user.
With the arrival of generative AI and large language designs like ChatGPT, the researchers saw a chance to make a simulated future self that could talk about someone’s real objectives and goals throughout a regular conversation.
“The system makes the simulation really reasonable. Future You is a lot more detailed than what a person might create by simply imagining their future selves,” says Maes.
Users begin by answering a series of concerns about their present lives, things that are necessary to them, and objectives for the future.
The AI system utilizes this information to produce what the scientists call “future self memories” which supply a backstory the model pulls from when interacting with the user.
For instance, the chatbot might discuss the highlights of somebody’s future profession or answer questions about how the user got rid of a particular challenge. This is possible since ChatGPT has been trained on extensive information including individuals about their lives, professions, and great and bad experiences.
The user engages with the tool in 2 ways: through introspection, when they consider their life and objectives as they construct their future selves, and memory, when they ponder whether the simulation reflects who they see themselves ending up being, says Yin.
“You can envision Future You as a story search space. You have a chance to hear how a few of your experiences, which might still be emotionally charged for you now, might be metabolized over the course of time,” she states.
To assist people picture their future selves, the system creates an age-progressed image of the user. The chatbot is also created to supply brilliant answers using expressions like “when I was your age,” so the simulation feels more like an actual future variation of the individual.
The ability to listen from an older version of oneself, rather than a generic AI, can have a more powerful favorable effect on a user contemplating an unsure future, Hershfield states.
“The interactive, brilliant parts of the platform give the user an anchor point and take something that might lead to anxious rumination and make it more concrete and efficient,” he includes.
But that realism could backfire if the simulation moves in a negative direction. To prevent this, they make sure Future You cautions users that it reveals only one possible version of their future self, and they have the company to alter their lives. Providing alternate responses to the questionnaire yields a completely different conversation.
“This is not a prophesy, however rather a possibility,” Pataranutaporn states.
Aiding self-development
To assess Future You, they conducted a user study with 344 individuals. Some users interacted with the system for 10-30 minutes, while others either connected with a generic chatbot or just completed surveys.
Participants who utilized Future You had the ability to build a closer relationship with their perfect future selves, based on an analytical analysis of their responses. These users also reported less stress and anxiety about the future after their interactions. In addition, Future You users stated the discussion felt sincere and that their worths and beliefs seemed constant in their simulated future identities.
“This work creates a new course by taking a reputable psychological technique to visualize times to come – an avatar of the future self – with cutting edge AI. This is exactly the type of work academics ought to be concentrating on as technology to construct virtual self models merges with big language models,” states Jeremy Bailenson, the Thomas More Storke Professor of Communication at Stanford University, who was not involved with this research.
Building off the outcomes of this preliminary user research study, the scientists continue to fine-tune the ways they develop context and prime users so they have discussions that assist develop a more powerful sense of future self-continuity.
“We want to direct the user to speak about particular topics, rather than asking their future selves who the next president will be,” Pataranutaporn says.
They are also adding safeguards to prevent people from misusing the system. For example, one might imagine a business producing a “future you” of a possible customer who accomplishes some great result in life due to the fact that they acquired a particular product.
Moving on, the researchers want to study specific applications of Future You, possibly by making it possible for people to check out different professions or imagine how their everyday options might affect environment modification.
They are likewise gathering data from the Future You pilot to better understand how individuals use the system.
“We don’t want individuals to become dependent on this tool. Rather, we hope it is a significant experience that helps them see themselves and the world in a different way, and aids with self-development,” Maes states.