AI-powered “doom calculator” predicts death, raising ethical questions about its use
Researchers in Denmark develop Eerie AI That Can predict your death.
Imagine an artificial intelligence that could predict when you will die just by looking at key details of your life. This ‘doom calculator’ is now a reality thanks to new AI research. But is this technology a pandora’s box we should avoid opening?
Researchers in Denmark and the US have created an AI system called life2vec that can predict if someone will die within four years with over 75% accuracy. The AI crunched data on age, health, jobs, income and other factors for over 6 million Danes. According to the research paper, it was fed sentences about life events, like “In September 2012, Francisco received 20,000 Danish kroner as a guard at a castle in Elsinore.”
We use the technology behind ChatGPT (something called transformer models) to analyse human lives by representing each person as the sequence of events that happens in their life,
Sune Lehmann, lead author of the December 2023 study.
Using sequence of life-events to predict human lives,
told The New York Post.
The researchers examined a mixed population of six million Danish people, who varied in gender and age, between 2008 and 2020. They then used the AI system to find out which subjects would live for at least four years after January 1, 2016.
“The scale of our dataset allows us to construct sequence-level representations of individual human life trajectories, which detail how each person moves through time,” reads the report. “We can observe how individual lives evolve in a space of diverse event types (information about a heart attack is mixed with salary increases or information about moving from an urban to a rural area).”
Over time, the AI became skilled at building full “life trajectories” for individuals with an accuracy rate of 78%. The researchers did not tell participants their predicted expiration dates though as they believe this “would be very irresponsible.”
Certain traits like mental illness, being male, and having a skilled job were tied to earlier demise. Leadership roles and higher pay correlated with longer life. Beyond mortality, the AI can also forecast personalities and major life decisions.
Lehmann also suggests that life2vec can help determine the factors that might help us live longer, although she admitted that they “haven’t gone deep with this yet.”
