In each slice of the Back to the future film franchise, a time machine drives the same general storyline: the main character must rewrite a moment in time to fix the lives of his family and friends.
Although there is no real way to see our future, animations and chatbots bring us closer to this possibility. “These technologies can actually create a simulation of a time machine by aging the person and helping them see a future version of themselves,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, an expert in AI-human interaction at MIT.
Although some may find this technology scary, many researchers are intrigued. People who can draw a mental line connecting where they are now and where they want to go—known as future personal continuity—tend to act in ways that will benefit them in the future, such as saving more money, according to much research. In contrast, people who view their future as outsiders often have difficulty making decisions and may experience intense regret.
Scientists have long sought to help people connect with their future self, for example by doing vivid imagination exercises or writing a letter to an older version of oneself.
Compared to these low-tech interventions, the researchers suspect that new avatars could help people think more concretely about their futures, with important caveats. A chatbot that helps people visualize achievable goals could be useful; A chatbot that reinforces people’s inaccessible fantasies could do the opposite, says social psychologist Anne Wilson. What’s problematic, she adds, is that AI tools are known for “blowing a lot of smoke.”
And, as two separate AI designs show, avatars project their creator’s worldview, supporting the different ways machines can guide people into their potential futures.
A virtual time machine influences people’s choices
People are turning to AI for advice, with a survey suggesting one in three American adults have used chatbots to help you with a career decision. Yet these tips generally lack personalization. “The more information an algorithm has about you, the more it can predict what you might value,” says Wilson, of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.
To this end, Pataranutaporn and his colleagues use various AI tools to age images of people by 30 years and then animate them. The team also supplies Claude Sonnet 4.5 with detailed questionnaires completed by individuals. Using this visual and contextual information, avatars can generate hypothetical but realistic future “memories.”
The team’s previous work suggests that chatting with a digital version of themselves helps young people connect with their future selves and imagine their lives in a decade.
This time, the researchers divided nearly 200 participants faced with a difficult decision into four groups who interacted with different avatars. The number of avatars people chatted with varied. A person considering their career choices can spend a few minutes chatting with an avatar-turned-doctor, avatars-turned-doctor or engineer, or avatars-turned-doctor, engineer or bioengineering professor, a new AI-generated suggestion. A fourth group, the control group, simply imagined their future as they considered a life decision. Research shows that imagining negative futures can increase mental distressso the team focused only on positive results.
Surprisingly, participants who spoke with all three avatars said they would choose the AI-generated suggestion 20 percent of the time, the team reported in the proceedings of the Augmented Humans 2026 international conference. This compares with less than 3 percent of participants in the control condition, who were simply asked whether they would choose a previously unconsidered path.
Whether people will stick to their inclinations after the experience remains to be seen, Pataranutaporn says. But the AI-generated option “shows how people can actually imagine futures they wouldn’t have thought of on their own.”
Not everyone is so positive. This new option could exploit people’s deepest desires or manipulate them into following the wrong path, says decision expert Simon van Baal of the University of Leeds in England. Marketing research shows that companies can lure people to lower-quality options because they’re shiny and new, he says. “The question is whether AI really adds anything here. This article doesn’t really answer that question.”
Identifying the Ingredients of a Difficult Choice Could Create a Robot Guide
Other critiques are deeper and attack the root reason people have trouble making decisions in the first place.
Most people, including social scientists, assume that choices about the future are difficult because they involve uncertainty and fear, says philosopher Ruth Chang of the University of Oxford in England. So the best way forward is to collect as much information as possible, possibly with the help of a chatbot.
This framework is flawed, Chang asserted in spring 2017. Journal of the American Philosophical Association. Fear and uncertainty play a role. But the central problem with hard choice is that no option is objectively superior, and yet any choice sets people on significantly different life paths. THE options are “tied” Chang said.
People have a really hard time making decisions that involve choosing between conflicting core valuesresearchers reported in April 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, should you care for your aging family or pursue a high-flying career?
Chang is developing an AI chatbot to help people make heartbreaking decisions. His tool will guide people through exercises that take hours. An exercise makes people ask themselves if the decision facing them is really difficult. Another crosses how the options might play out for better – or for worse.
“My… agent helps you think about a choice,” says Chang. “Can you commit to one type of path over another? »
Users may realize that they are not ready to commit. Then the rational, albeit uncomfortable, choice might be to wait, Chang says. For those who are ready to commit, Chang says, the decision can be empowering, affirming their identity with a choice that declares, “I am that kind of person.” »
Avatar or human, that is the question
The avatars of the future are flashy, but are they better than humans? It’s not clear, says van Baal, who wishes the control group in the MIT study would talk with a living, breathing person instead of thinking their thoughts alone. “That’s what people do all the time in our lives,” he says.
But if they’re talking with like-minded people, they probably don’t see all the possibilities, says behavioral scientist Adrian Camilleri. Preliminary research published in March suggests that “AI tools can serve as a sounding board to deliver unusual or confusing advice it broadens a person’s perspective,” says Camilleri, of the University of Technology Sydney.
Except there’s a problem. In this tentative work, at least, the chatbot advised hypothetical participants with higher incomes to dream big and focus on the long-term benefits. He advises low-income participants to take less risk and focus on short-term stability.
The time machine in Back to the future films are prone to glitches in unforeseen ways, in one case sending its inventor to 1885 instead of 1985. Is it so surprising, then, that virtual time machines can also emit occasional burps?