Technology
Would You Try It? AI Doom Calculator Can Predict When You’ll Die
A new study has created an “AI DOOM calculator” that uses four pieces of information to estimate when a person might die. Think of it like a smart computer that can predict when someone will pass away based on certain aspects of their life. The question now is whether this technology is something we should be cautious about using, like opening a Pandora’s box.
Scientists in Denmark and the United States have developed a computer program called life2vec. This program can guess if a person might pass away in the next four years, and it’s correct more than 75% of the time. To do this, the program looked at information about age, health, occupation, income, and other details from over 6 million people in Denmark. The researchers also trained the program by giving it sentences about people’s life events, like “In September 2012, Francisco got 20,000 Danish kroner working as a guard at a castle in Elsinore.”
“We use the same technology that powers ChatGPT, known as transformer models, to study people’s lives. We represent each person as a series of events that occur in their life,” explained Sune Lehmann, the main author of the December 2023 study titled “Using a sequence of life-events to predict human lives,” to The New York Post.
Meet the ' AI Doom Calculator,' an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm
“A new computer program called Life2vec has been developed, and it performs as well as other programs in predicting details about people’s lives. However, what sets it apart is its chatbot-like functionality, resembling ChatGPT.
Scientists in Denmark and the US developed Life2vec, providing it with information about six million people in Denmark spanning from 2008 to 2020. In contrast to ChatGPT, this program considers factors such as income, occupation, location, injuries, and pregnancy history.
Despite the promising results, the scientists have not yet allowed the general public to use Life2vec. In a trial with a group aged 35 to 65, half of whom passed away between 2016 and 2020, the program accurately predicted details 78% of the time.”
How the AI Doom Calculator System Functions:
Collecting Information:
- Health Records (like diagnoses, medications, and hospital stays)
- Personal Details (age, gender, education, income, job)
- Work History
- Friendships and Relationships
- Where You Live (geographic location)
Accurately Predicting Death 78 Percent of the Time
They discovered that its predictions were 78 percent more accurate than any other AI model currently available.
The study’s main author, Sune Lehman from DTU, explained, “It’s exciting to think about human life as a long series of events, similar to how a sentence in a language is made up of a series of words.”
“In typical cases, transformer models in AI are employed for tasks like this. However, in our experiments, we utilized them to explore what we term life sequences—events that have occurred in human life.”
Moreover, she emphasized, “Our model shouldn’t be utilized by an insurance company because the entire concept of insurance is grounded in sharing the uncertainty of who will be affected by an incident, death, or loss of belongings. By collectively sharing this uncertainty, we can handle the burden.”
Furthermore, she expressed concern, stating, “It’s likely that big tech companies with a lot of data about us are already employing similar models to make predictions about our behavior.”
Final thoughts:
Life2vec is a fascinating advancement in AI that helps us understand human life better. But, it’s important to be careful. We need to know its limits and think about what’s right and wrong. As we look ahead, it’s crucial to develop this technology responsibly so that it can be a good thing without hurting people’s privacy and well-being.
