How Chat can tell you today what you will do later
It took me a while to write that headline, and it's not long enough to express what I was trying to say. The point I was making is that an AI like ChatGPT 5.0 or Gemini if carefully prompted can tell your future, in a way.
What I mean is that if you teach the AI enough about you, your personality, your goals, your style of problem solving, your likes and dislikes, it can predict what you will be interested in months or even years from now, even if you don't have a clue.
The secret is to make the AI learn about you extensively, using something like this extensively tested prompt from Stanford Professor Jeremy Utley:
"Hey! You’re an AI expert
I would love your help and a consultation with you to help me figure out where I can best leverage AI in my life.
As an AI expert, would you please ask me questions? One at a time until you have enough context about my workflows, responsibilities, KPIs, and objectives that you could make two obvious recommendations and two non-obvious recommendations of how I can leverage AI in my life."
We've tried this with several students of AI Happiness Accelerator. The 'obvious recommendations' turned out to be just that. Not very exciting. The gold was in the "non-obvious recommendations".
In Jill's case, Chat told her that her way of researching virtual coding would eventually lead to an interest in pursuing her musical talent more seriously. It did.
With Mia, Meta.ai told her that she would feel a need to re-connect with old friends, who would remind her of parts of herself that had been neglected. This happened.
Why does this work? It's for the same reason that our friends often know things about us that we don't see. They have an objective view; we are 'too close' to ourselves.
AI can't replace friends, but it can use its knowledge of our lives (if prompted correctly) to make reasonably intelligent predictions about how things will play out in the future.
Try it! Use the above Jeremy Utley prompt with your favorite AI. We find that the conversation usually takes about half an hour. Tell us if you discovered something new about yourself.
