YourFutureU · Your Future You: An Intelligent Conversational Agent to Increase Future Orientation and Decrease Self-defeating Behavior

This PoC action harnesses the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance future orientation and mental well-being, and to mitigate self-defeating behaviors. Building on recent evidence that future-oriented thinking —a key factor in academic performance, health, wealth, and goal achievement— can be stimulated, we aim to address the scaling and impact-related challenges of existing interventions. Leveraging the power of AI-powered large language models (LLMs), our proposed solution is to develop an intelligent conversational agent that allows for meaningful interaction with one's future self. This agent will utilize user-specific inputs —such as personality traits and other individual characteristics— to create a backstory of their personal history, i.e., a synthetic memory, and enable a highly personalized and relatable conversation between users and their future, i.e., 10-year older, self.Frequent dialogues with the future self instill a more vivid image of the future self and increase the psychological connection to it. This in turn increases the motivation and ability to consider the longer-term consequences of decisions and reduces the likelihood that people opt for immediate gratification. This effort is facilitated by features known to enhance decision-making: perspective taking, a vivid mental image of the future, and the ability to distance oneself from situations.Originating from our ERC CoG action, in which we used virtual reality technology and smartphone apps to generate future-self avatars, we have begun to see promising results, such as higher levels of engagement and a demonstrated capacity to stimulate future orientation as well as symptom reduction in depression and suicidal ideation. Expanding on this prior work, we aim to develop an innovative solution that integrates the behavioral sciences and computer science, making mental health care more affordable and accessible while addressing self-defeating behaviors in diverse populations.