Hi HN,

I had the idea of exploring alternate timelines using generative AI, and the result so far is a free tool called FutureYouGPT.com.

The tool is fairly basic for now: you provide a goal you want to achieve, and it creates a Future You persona, set six months into the future. This persona has its own synthetic memories and identity, extrapolated from your present state, which currently comes from your text input. However, I've already implemented the functionality that allows it to learn about you from websites and X/Twitter, but its not live. The tool also grades both Current You and Future You on several subjective metrics I found important (Happiness, Clarity, Fear, Consistency Level, EQ, Risk Tolerance). It also provides a short roadmap on how to achieve your goal.

You can chat with your Future You as well—the idea is to explore potential timelines.

Projecting ourselves into the future has long been a societal fascination. For example, Stoics like Seneca proposed Premeditatio Malorum, a practice of simulating possible future scenarios to avoid being surprised by life's randomness and to enhance individual awareness when making decisions.

There is also significant academic research in this area. The fields include Episodic Future Thinking, Future Self-Continuity, and the Mental Simulation of Causality. For those interested, I’ve linked in the app a Notion page with some papers. The findings align with my own experience of simulating my future self, something I've been doing for years.

I’m very excited by the potential of this idea and have many thoughts on how to develop it further. Let me know what you think! Am I crazy to believe we can actually explore alternate timelines and, step by step, build a real-time simulation of our lives?