An AI calculator can predict when we will die. Are you ready to try it?
2024-01-10 15:24:04
TiranaPost
Our lives, like stories, follow a narrative. Each life unfolds uniquely through chapters with familiar titles such as: school, career, home, injuries, illnesses. Every story, or life, has an unpredictable beginning, middle and end.
Now, according to scientists, every life story is the chronicle of a foretold death. Using Denmark's register data, which contains a wealth of daily information on education, salary, work, working hours, housing and doctor visits, academics have developed an algorithm that can predict a person's life course, including premature death. How is it done? Much the same way that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can predict sentences.
The fact that our complex existence can be analyzed as bits of text is both exciting and disturbing. While we know that generous income is associated with longevity, other data can reveal social factors that influence health and longevity. This can inform policy makers seeking to improve our chances of living longer and healthier lives.
On the other hand DeathGPT (which predicts death) does not seem so reliable for some reason.
Different life events and situations such as taking a class, getting a raise, losing a parent are experienced in a very personal way by everyone. So it would be difficult to power a data set and make it predictable.
Both language (in ChatGPT) and life are sequences. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Northeastern University in Boston exploited this similarity. First, they compiled a 'vocabulary' of life events, creating a kind of synthetic language, and used it to construct 'sentences'. An example sentence might be: 'During her third year at boarding school, Hermione took five electives.'
Such a sentence, for example, found matches in 6 million inhabitants of Denmark from the data of the years 2008 to 2015.
The researchers claim that accurate individual predictions are indeed possible and that the algorithm provides a probability of death for a certain period rather than an exact date.
The researchers do not want their work to be used by life insurance companies and are keeping the algorithm and data secret for now.
If this all comes to fruition, would you be willing to enter your details and find out when you're going to die?
Poll
*The writer is a science commentator. Adapt Tiranapost.al
