How Can Art Help You Live Your Best Life?
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, this concept seems intriguing. There’s a swath of socio-scientific research that proves how poor we can be at planning for the future and making logical decisions. But is meeting a smug Future You really the solution? Or is being unoptimized, plodding, self-defeating – and human – perhaps the very best part of us?
Future You is biohacking meets the “carpe diem” message of Dead Poets Society. And that’s what makes it both intrusive and pointless. Intrusive because you can imagine it used to shame people for their life choices. But also pointless because this is fake progress. Everything we need to know about how to live well and how to live badly can be found in any art gallery, library, or theatre in the world.
The great irony is that while we invest in AI and tech, the arts and humanities are losing funding and prominence. Have we become so narcissistic that we are turning away from painting and poetry to only pay attention to holograms of our fake, generic “future selves”? The last thing we need to do is gaze ever deeper into a simulation of Narcissus’ pool.
Not only are these lessons not new to us, there’s no real proof that endlessly optimizing ourselves is going to make us any happier or live any longer. The AI robot is not going to flash up a message that says: “Sorry, you can’t engage with your 60-year-old self because you are going to be run over by a bus tomorrow. Think carefully about your underwear choices.”
The trouble with our AI future selves and with apps that tell us when to breathe in and breathe out again is that they give the impression that we’re on the verge of some radical discovery. But it’s all just the same truths artists have been trying to express for centuries.
In conclusion, art and literature have already been telling us everything we need to know about how to live well and how to live badly. Perhaps it’s time to turn to the timeless wisdom found in the arts rather than relying on AI for guidance on living our best lives.
*Keywords: AI future self, art, literature, biohacking, humanities*
Source: Viv Groskop, “How do I live my best life? I’ll consult a painting, thanks – not my smug ‘AI future self’”