Who Will I Become?

Confessions of An Aging Digital Storyteller

I began this inquiry in August with a detective’s hunch and a teacher’s itch. I wanted to see how the next quarter century of technology might bend the arc of story work—how it might make us better listeners to ourselves and each other. If you’ve been dabbling (or diving) in the fifty shades of AI-mania—yes, I hear the mixed metaphor—you already sense another threshold under our feet. We crossed one with the personal computer, another with the web, another with the smartphone. Now the room is tilting again. So I decided to try a few things, not as a futurist with a crystal ball, but as a working elder with callouses from a lifetime of workshops.

At the heart of this is a simple, old question with a new shine: what does it mean to be human—and what might it mean to be more-than-human—as we age? Not superhuman, not synthetic saints; just people with a longer reach because the tools at hand are kinder, smarter, and tuned to our years.

I have always thought of myself as an ordinary joe who stumbled into an extraordinary life—traveling the world helping folks make small, honest films. I’m also the sort who likes to fiddle with the next gadget. In the realm of generative AI, especially image and video synthesis, I’ve already spent a couple of years exploring a new kind of digital storytelling (see my Voices of the Future Present workshop and the sample stories (2024 playlist - 2025 playlist) from the 100 Years Project). But this time I aimed the lens at myself and my cohort—those crossing the border into the seventies and beyond. What would we actually use? What would dignify our days?

The Character of AI Joe

I’ve been telling my kids for years that I’m building a functioning bot of myself they can call long after I’m gone. They say they’ll believe it’s me if the bot is cheap and easily distracted. Fair enough. The not-so-funny truth is: many folks are already planning to outlive themselves in data, and plenty of companies are happy to help them try.

As a story oldster, I’m curious about this frontier where aging meets AI. How close are we to a digital double that passes the mirror test in the dim light of memory? My benchmark borrows from Gregory Bateson’s sideways riff on Turing: if, when I ask the machine a question, it answers, “Let me tell you a story,” we’re getting somewhere. In my case: when I ask it to tell a story as me—and what comes back feels like something I’d actually write—then we’re close. Close enough that “AI Joe” might cut a digital story I’d accept as my own: a true arc, a clean turn, and a closing image that hangs in the air.

Why push on this? I know the chorus: AI can’t make “great” art; it can’t carry a body’s history; it can’t source the bruised complexity of lived time. Yes—and. I’ve helped more than ten thousand people make intimate, personal films. They are quick snapshots of experience, charged with the ordinary sacred. What makes them sing is rarely perfection of form; it’s the tremble in the voice, the pause after a hard sentence, the way a laugh breaks through at the wrong moment and feels exactly right. We are exquisitely tuned to the signal of feeling amid all that noise. We lean toward humanity when we hear it.

Here’s the rub: the ways we sort our lives in reflection have patterns. As we age, we learn to catch the tricks of our own confirmation bias. Our narratives broaden, our metaphors deepen, our humor gets saltier and kinder. Those are human patterns—but patterns nonetheless. Which means they could be replicated, approximated, learned by a system that pays attention. The conditional “could” is the honest terrain I’m walking.

Why It Matters for Later Life

When I wrote Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience, I found myself circling back to Erik Erikson’s notion of “narrative coherence”—the late-life task of accepting “one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be.” That isn’t passivity; it’s a hard-won kindness toward our own path. Most of us arrive there by moving through regret and second-guessing toward a balanced account of our choices in context. Personal storytelling—whether with a therapist, a friend, a grandchild, a digital storytelling facilitator, or all of the above with an AI assist—is perspective work. It’s how we metabolize time.

So imagine, not a single app, but an ecosystem I’ve come to call ElderWare: voice-first companions that keep the beat of the day; quiet sensors that notice before they nag; creative tools that help us write, speak, and assemble our lives into shareable meaning. The health side watches over gait and glucose; the story side tends the archive of memory. The two talk to each other with consent at the center. A restless week of sleep becomes a gentle prompt: “Want to tell me what’s on your mind?” A VR visit to a childhood street becomes a bridge to a conversation with a nephew who’s never been there. A fall-prevention lamp doubles as the light where you record blessings for the family.

But let’s be clear: the promise is only worth anything if equity is the spine. Tools with elders, not for elders. Interfaces in our languages, fonts big enough for stubborn eyes, flows that forgive mistakes. Data under community rules, not only corporate ones. Rural broadband as a civil right. Caregivers supported, not surveilled. Consent as a practice, not a checkbox. That’s not decoration; that’s the architecture that keeps dignity intact.

So—who will I be? With luck and stubbornness, I’ll still be the guy who starts the kettle and listens for the house to answer back. I may have a low-rent, distractible bot that can tell a decent story about some favorite topic of mine (likely a topic mix of sports, socialism, and sarcasm). You get the idea for me, the real work isn’t to escape the limits of being human. It’s to lean into them with better tools—tools that help us accept, connect, and create, right up to the edge of our days.

If we build these tools with care—curious, stubborn, kind—then the future won’t ask our elders to disappear into the machine. It will invite us to stay ourselves a little longer, and to pass along what only we can: a living archive stitched from breath, laughter, and the stories that made us.

What's Out There Already, What’s Coming

Of course one of the ways AI is useful, is simply researching topics and getting some coherent organization of what work is being done in an area of focus. I created an ongoing research document (AI and Aging) based on a process of digging out the areas of research, of new technology development, of existing apps and platforms, of wearables.  You are welcome to slog through my notes, or just hear me out on my thinking about what will shift in story work and aging in the next quarter century based on my initial dive.

When I say “future of story and aging with technology,” I’m talking about two braided streams: keeping the body steady and keeping the story alive. If we do this well, we don’t just add years to life; we add coherence, connection, and a little mischief to the years we have.

On the body side, the most promising systems work the way good caregivers do: they notice. AI-powered monitoring—quiet wearables paired with smart-home sensors—can read the tiny tremors and tempo changes of everyday life. A slower turn out of bed, a shortened stride in the hallway, restless sleep over three nights—patterns that whisper before they shout. Designed for aging bodies, not varsity athletes, these systems can nudge us and our clinicians toward timely care, catching the preventable before it becomes the unmanageable.

Layer onto that the return of an old friend: the voice. Imagine companions built specifically for our elders that don’t just recite pill schedules but hold the thread of a day—checking in on pain, appetite, and mood; asking the follow-up question a rushed visit misses; bridging to care teams without trapping us in password purgatory. A good voice companion doesn’t infantilize. It respects cadence, accent, silence. It understands that the difference between “I’m fine” and “I’m fine…” is where the truth lives.

My Apple Watch senses a jolt now and asks if I’ve fallen, and will call the calvary if I need one.  Falls remain something to fear, often a step toward more rapid decline, but here too the horizon is wider than a wrist panic button. Computer vision at the edges of our spaces, wearable balance cues, and environment-aware lighting can lower risk before gravity has its say. And if we do go down, systems that assess likely injury and coordinate the right response—neighbor, nurse, or EMT—save both minutes and dignity.

Cognitive health deserves an equally thoughtful toolkit. Personalized platforms that adapt to the contours of a particular mind—your metaphors, your puzzles, your favorite music—can meet us where we are, not where a generic test thinks we should be. Imagine VR that lets someone walk the block of their childhood or have coffee at a long-demolished diner, paired with memory practices grounded in their actual life—voices of friends, the smell of rain on a specific street. This is therapy with roots, not abstractions.

And of course, the clinic is coming home. Telehealth tied to real biometric streams—blood pressure that doesn’t require an ordeal, glucose that flows into charts without a cable circus, even the infamous “smart toilet” quietly checking markers we once ignored—will let care be both continuous and mercifully mundane. The point isn’t more data; it’s better timing, fewer crises, and care conversations that begin with, “Here’s what your week looked like—what did it feel like?”

But health isn’t the whole of living. We are story-bearing creatures, and late life is when we become the family archive, the cultural hard drive. We need “story work” technologies that honor that role.

Start with the memoir tools. Picture an assistant that interviews like a patient friend, pulls threads from photos and letters, and helps shape a life without sanding off the voice. It can transcribe our Texas drawl or Queens staccato faithfully, find the box of forgotten Super 8s in the closet, and propose a structure that feels like us—a four-beat tale with a clean turn and true closure.

Then there’s immersive memory. AR/VR not as escape hatch but as bridge: walking a grandchild through the shipyard where you took your first paycheck; standing at a lunch counter where you once stood your ground; placing a parent’s voice at the dining table again on a holiday. Done with care, these are rooms of repair and delight.

We’ll also need intelligent scrapbooking that can wrangle decades of photographs, name the cousins, date the parade, and suggest storylines. When we restore an old snapshot, we’re not just cleaning pixels; we’re polishing a portal. The machine can help, but the meaning belongs to us.

Multi-generational platforms can make asking and telling easier. Prompts that are more than “Tell me about your childhood,” shared timelines that trace a family’s crossings and returnings, and video calls that are really story circles—spaces where listening is an act of love, and the record we make is portable, searchable, and safe.

Finally, “voice-to-everything” is liberation for tired hands and sore eyes. Speak a scene once; out come a page, a slideshow with narration, a podcast episode, a small book for the mantle. The best of these tools will learn our rhythms and leave our fingerprints intact.

All of this only matters if equity sits at the center. Tech built “for” elders but not with us will fail. Consent must be a practice, not a form: clear choices about what’s collected, who sees it, when we change our minds. Data needs to live under community rules, not just corporate terms; caregivers paid and unpaid must be supported, not surveilled. Rural broadband and multilingual interfaces are not “nice-to-haves”—they are civil rights for an aging society. And accessibility—big type, high contrast, forgiving flows—should be the default, not the afterthought.

What happens when these streams converge? The home becomes a clinic that doesn’t feel like a clinic and a studio that invites us to shape the meaning of our days. Health alerts are paired with narrative prompts: “Your sleep has been rough—want to talk about what’s keeping you up?” A fall prevention lamp doubles as a light for the desk where you record your grandson a blessing. The device that catches an arrhythmia also remembers your mother’s cornbread recipe.

I’ve consider this ecosystem the heart of ElderWare. Not gadgets, but a culture of design that treats age as a stage of power, not decline. If we do it right, we’ll give older adults the tools to stay put, stay connected, and stay themselves. And we’ll give families and communities something priceless: the living, breathing archive of wisdom that only elders carry.

May we build it together—curious, stubborn, and kind—so that when the light comes on tomorrow morning, it finds us not just alive, but fully in our story.

AI JOE 1.0

I’ll be sharing more about my adventures with bots in the near future. But I have already created two working models, that I’m training like you would a puppy.

ElevenLabs is an AI voice technology company that creates remarkably realistic synthetic speech, allowing users to clone voices, generate speech in multiple languages, and produce natural-sounding narration from text with human-like emotion and intonation.

Following their guide to creating “agents”, I’ve created this Joe-Agent-Bot that you can talk to.  It speaks sort of like me (has an odd modulation of synthetic voice approximation and what sounds like words out of my mouth) based on my feeding it countless samples of my audio book, my lectures, my teaching/feedback, and my digital stories).  It also is meant to think like me, again, it has digested all my books, my emails, my scripts, etc.   Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

Similarly, as a text chat bot, I created AI Joe - A Virtual Digital Storytelling Facilitator, as a mechanism, again in an approximation of my writing style (perhaps a bit more texan than I really am, despite my being raised there), to answers infinite questions one might have about the theory and practice of digital storytelling.

Several caveats.  I know folks in my greater community who find all this deeply troubling.  Like… is this not the height of de-humanization?  WTF!!!  And the energy/environmental issues! And the narcissism inherent!  No one should try to create a simulacra of self.  Frankenstein’s A.I.! Ay yay yay!  

Again, as you have read, I am playing with an edge here.  Knowingly, I hope, my humble enough to not pretend I can predict that my good intentions could go awry.  As I said in last week’s post, we are in a moment of battle for human-centered, democratic values in the face of techno-authoritarianism.  Wouldn’t conscientious objection be better than attempts of subverting the technology via engagement?  My tendency is the latter.  Digital storytelling was built on Apple/Adobe/Microsoft/WeVideo/Google technologies, and I feel it has done good in the world.  

I would hope we can find ways to surf the coming waves of computing capacities to arrive somewhere better than we are now.

If you want to discuss, debate or debrief this article or others, you can find me at joe@storyhost.net.