What is your expected lifespan? An AI system designed to forecast life and death.
In an effort to increase awareness of the potential benefits and risks of technology, researchers in Denmark are using artificial intelligence and data from millions of people to predict a person’s life events from infancy to old age.
Instead than being drawn to any macabre fascinations, the developers of life2vec aim to investigate the patterns and connections that so-called deep-learning programs can find in order to forecast a variety of social or health-related “life-events.”
It’s a fairly broad framework for forecasting the lives of people. One of the authors of a study that was just published in the journal Nature Computational Science, Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), told AFP that the technology can predict anything as long as you have training data.
For Lehmann, the options are virtually limitless.
It might forecast medical results. Thus, it might be able to forecast obesity or fertility, as well as the likelihood of developing cancer or not. However, it can also indicate whether you’ll be wealthy,” he added.
The program employs a methodology akin to ChatGPT’s, but instead examines life-influencing factors like birth, education, social advantages, and even work schedules.
The group is attempting to “examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences” by modifying the advancements that made it possible for language-processing algorithms.
“One way to look at life is as a series of events: people are born, go to the pediatrician, begin school, relocate, get married, and so on,” Lehmann stated.
However, the program’s release soon gave rise to rumors of a new “death calculator,” with some phony websites tricking users into using the AI program to estimate their life expectancy, frequently in return for personal information.
The software, according to the researchers, is confidential and not currently accessible online or to the larger scientific community.
Data from 6 million
The anonymized data of around six million Danes, gathered by the official Statistics Denmark organization, is the foundation of the life2vec model.
Life outcomes can be predicted by analyzing event sequences all the way up to the point of death.
The system is accurate in 78 percent of situations when it comes to death prediction and in 73 percent of cases when it comes to forecasting if a person would relocate to a new city or nation.
We examine premature mortality. Thus, we use a relatively youthful sample, ages 35 to 65. Then, using data from the eight years between 2008 and 2016, we attempt to forecast whether someone would pass away in the next four years, according to Lehmann.
“It is something that the model is much better at than any other algorithm we could find,” he stated.
The researchers claim that by concentrating on this age group, where deaths are typically rare, they are able to confirm the algorithm’s dependability.
The program isn’t yet prepared for usage outside of a research environment, though.
As of right now, Lehmann explained, “it’s a research project where we’re exploring what’s possible and what’s not possible.”
In addition, he and his associates wish to investigate long-term results and the influence of social ties on life and health.
Public counterpoint
The study offers the academics a scientific counterbalance to the substantial sums of money that big tech corporations are investing in AI systems.
The study offers the academics a scientific counterbalance to the substantial sums of money that big tech corporations are investing in AI systems.
They are able to construct such models as well, but they are keeping them private. Lehmann remarked, “They’re not talking about them.”
“They’re just building them with the hopes of selling you more ads in the near future, or more ads combined with product sales.”
“To begin to understand what can even happen with data like this,” he stated, it is vital to have an open and public counterpoint.
This was particularly true, according to Danish data ethics expert Pernille Tranberg, who spoke with AFP, because companies like insurance companies were already using comparable algorithms.
“They probably put you into groups and say: ‘Okay, you have a chronic disease, the risk is this and this’,” Tranberg said.
She stated, “It can be used against us to discriminate so that you will have to pay a higher insurance premium, or you can’t get public health care because you’re going to die anyway, or you can’t get a bank loan.”
Certain developers have previously attempted to commercialize algorithms that anticipate our own demise.
“Prediction clocks, which show how old we’re going to get, are already visible on the web,” Tranberg stated. “A few of them aren’t trustworthy at all.”
