The Future of You

60 Episodes

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Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines

2026-10-0101:04:40

What happens when machines become part of our relationships? And what happens to us when we start conversing with machines? In this episode of Me:chine Dialogues, Tracey Follows speaks with Sherry Turkle, MIT professor, psychologist and one of the world’s most influential thinkers on technology, identity and human relationships. For more than four decades, Sherry has studied what our relationships with technologies reveal about us — from computers and virtual worlds to smartphones, social med...

Who Gets to Interpret You? | The Machine-Readable Self

2026-07-3008:48

What happens when identity stops being something we declare and becomes something machines infer? In this specially assembled edition of The Future of You, Tracey Follows returns to four conversations that reveal how the self is becoming machine-readable. Artist and AI pioneer Holly Herndon explains why anything captured in media can become training data. Journalist Kashmir Hill traces the rise of searchable facial recognition and the danger of infrastructure built for security being used for...

The Database Brand: How AI is changing what a brand is

2026-06-1618:09

This is a short audio essay, based on the first Futuremade View. In The Database Brand, Tracey extends her work on identity, machine readability and the shift from the Designed Self to the Database Self, applying it to brands. For most of modern marketing history, brands were treated as designed identities: names, logos, promises, personalities and desired places in the minds of consumers. But in an AI-mediated world, brands are increasingly assembled from attributes, signals, reviews, metada...

Human Resilience in the AI Age

2026-05-2001:01:22

What if the real threat from AI is not that it suddenly takes over? What if we just slowly hand ourselves over? In this episode of Me:chine Dialogues, Tracey Follows speaks with Lee Rainie, Director of Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, about the new report Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age, co-authored with Janna Q. Anderson. This is a substantial report: the 52nd Future of Digital Life report from Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Cen...

Conclusion — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

2026-04-3013:16

These recordings are taken from the original 2021 edition of The Future of You by Tracey Follows. The chapters are presented here as an audio archive of the text as it was written and published at that time. The book explores how emerging technologies - from artificial intelligence to digital identity systems, and genomics - are reshaping the nature of personal identity and the idea of the self. This episode contains from the original 2021 edition: Conclusion — The Future of You (...

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