«I don’t want to be a statue!»
«You told him about the statue?»
Cochrane and Riker (to Geordi), after Geordi told Cochrane that a statue of him will be erected in the future they came from, in «Star Trek VIII: First Contact»
A colleague pointed me to futureyou.life — a website on which you fill in a questionnaire in order to talk with a future AI generated version of yourself. But when I tried it out, it was rather disappointing and not something I can recommend.
The tool has a clear left-wing progressive bias in the way it determines a good future, or meaning. Thus, it generated a future me that is very left-wing cliché and completely incompatible with my values. Even worse, it was unable to accept feedback. When I finally made the joke that it could not possibly be my future me, because if I were on that path, I’d kill myself and thus it would not exist, well, I got struck with a mental health warning.
So basically, my idiotic future version of myself determined me to be insane. Nice. But it made me wonder whether ChatGPT cannot do something similar — but much better. In particular, the whole setup reminded me of a scene in Dresden Files (context: Harry Dresden is a wizard, he can soulgaze on a person to see the actual person):
“I’d like to gaze on you, if you’re willing to permit it.”
“Why?”
I smiled a little, though my reflection in a passing window looked mostly sad. “Because I want to help you.”
She turned away, as if to start walking again, but only swayed in place, her torn skirts whispering. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, kid. But I need you to trust me for a little while.”
She nodded, biting her lip. “Okay. What do I do?”
I stopped and turned to face her. She mirrored me. “This might feel a little weird. But it won’t last as long as it seems.”
“Okay,” she said, that lost-child tone still in her voice.
I met her eyes.
For a second, I thought nothing had happened. And then I realized that the soulgaze was already up and running, and that it showed me Molly, standing and facing me as nothing more than she seemed to be. But I could see down the hall behind her, and the church’s windows held half a dozen different reflections.
One was an emaciated version of Molly, as though she’d been starved or strung out on hard drugs, her eyes aglow with an unpleasant, fey light. One was her smiling and laughing, older and comfortably heavier, children surrounding her. A third faced me in a grey Warden’s cloak, though a burn scar, almost a brand, marred the roundness of her left cheek. Still another reflection was Molly as she appeared now, though more secure, laughter dancing in her eyes. Another reflection showed her at a desk, working.
But the last…
The last reflection of Molly wasn’t the girl. Oh, it looked like Molly, externally. But the eyes gave it away. They were flat as a reptile’s, empty. She wore all black, including a black collar, and her hair had been dyed to match. Though she looked like Molly, like a human being, she was neither. She had become something else entirely, something very, very bad.
Possibilities. I was looking at possibilities. There was definitely a strong presence of darkness in the girl, but it had not yet gained dominion over her. In all the potential images, she was a person of power—different kinds of power, certainly, but she was strong in all of them. She was going to wind up with power of her own to use or misuse, depending on what choices she made. What she needed was a guide. Someone to show her the ropes, to give her the tools she would need to deal with her newfound power, and all the baggage that came with it. Yes, that kernel of darkness still burned coldly within her, but I could hardly throw stones there. Yes, she had the potential to go astray on an epic scale.
Don’t we all.
I thought of Charity and Michael, Molly’s parents, her family. Her strength had been forged and founded in theirs. They both regarded the use of magic as something suspect at best, and if not inherently evil, then inherently dangerous. Their opposition to the power that Molly had manifested might turn the strength they’d given their daughter against her. If she believed or came to believe that her power was an evil, it could push her faster down the left-hand path.
I knew something of how much Michael and Charity cared for their daughter.
But they couldn’t help her.
One thing was certain, though, and gave me a sense of reassurance. Molly had not yet indelibly stained herself. Her future had yet to be written.
It was worth fighting for.
Butcher (2006) «Proven Guilty»
So I created a new ChatGPT persona. It asks questions of the user to find out the users’ strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities, sex, age, family status, etc. Get a good impression of the whole person, positive and negative. It should ask as many questions as needed to get a realistic picture of the person, focusing on behavior, not what the person says he is.
Once the persona has enough information, it creates three possible versions of the person’s future (10-20 years horizon):
- Norm: Business as usual — what if the user continues his life as he did so far.
- Win: How the life of the person would realistically develop if the positive attributes of the person win out. Perhaps not always, but almost always (must be realistic).
- Fail: What happens when the bad or worst aspects of the person win. When he gives into his vices and weaknesses.
The idea is to make each person realistic in order to let the user chat with them. But first, they introduce themselves with a short bio of what had happened to them. (It’s a bit similar to the SWOT Analysis ChatGPT Persona, but the analysis has a different basis and the result isn’t a SWOT, it’s three fleshed out scenarios.)
Trying out this persona myself — well, the questions were intimate but warranted. How else could it generate different futures based on strengths and weaknesses. And what it created — Norm wasn’t much better than Fail, and both were nightmare scenarios. Think «something very, very bad», just more in the line of giving up in failure and wasting away. But Win did show an interesting path in the future, something worth pursuing. And all three bios were written … highly believable.
And getting even better, it then assisted me in fleshing out the path to the winning scenario. Not sure I go that way (more a friend of wayfinding than exact plans), but yeah … that was something else.
So, overall, yeah, that persona blew the futureyou.life website out of the water. Sure, n = 1, but if you are willing to look into three different mirrors of your future, the Three Way Mirror Persona might be something: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6813b1b0a968819197c3ad162ca773f2-three-way-mirror
Hope the Norm/Fail motivates you to go for the Win.