Through This Website You Can Chat With Your Future ‘You’
Future Self allows you to have a simulated conversation with the person you will be in 20 years’ time.
One of the many theories on procrastination, and perhaps the most interesting, is that we procrastinate because we think of our future self as a stranger. We leave him/her the difficult tasks and the solution of problems because we don’t think it will be us that will have to eventually solve them. There is a tremendous ontological disconnection between us in the here and now and the future versions of us. But this is perhaps about to change. A new website called Future Self allows you to have a conversation with the person that you will be in 2034. You can hold an exotic chat with a shocking – and British – version of yourself. One who doesn’t know much about anything and will perhaps even avoid all of your questions to simply talk.
Nevertheless, and beyond the mere entertainment of augmented reality, the simulated experience is quite revealing. It is probably the greatest glimpse that we can have today of a simulation in which we can hold a hypothetical conversation with ourselves for social or therapeutic use. Because perhaps the day will come when our computer will know enough about us that it will know more than our diary or our mirror.
Future Self uses a complex combination of motion capture, voice recognition and 3D rendering software and creates a semi-realistic simulation of how you might look in 20 years, and then it allows you to ask questions. The platform was created as an advertising campaign for the phone company Orange (which is why you’ll have a British accent in the future) to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
While you talk to the future version of yourself on whether you have children, or if you are happy or if cars can fly, the most likely result is that you’ll see yourself as stranger and more disconnected from yourself than ever; but you’ll have the perfect audiovisual excuse to narrow the ontological distance between the ‘you-here-and-now’ and the later version of you, which requires responsibility over your actions and your body.
Now, and before you turn to your future self, it’s worth asking yourself: Is my mind ready to talk to an old version on me?
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