Do you want to know when you will die? Science may perhaps be getting closer to providing that option.
Latest advances? Artificial intelligence algorithm called “fate calculator” British Daily Mailpredicted whether people would die within four years in more than 75% of cases.
More details on the project, carried out by researchers in Denmark and the United States, can be found this week. natural computational science Online journal. They created an AI machine learning transformer model that is similar to ChatGPT, but people cannot interact with it like ChatGPT.
But the model, called life2vec, processed data on more than 6 million Danish citizens, including their age, health, education, job, income, and other life events, provided by the Danish government, which collaborated on the study.
The model was taught to assimilate information about people’s lives in sentences such as “In September 2012, Francisco received 20,000 Danish kroner as a guard in the castle of Elsinore.” Or, “During her third year at secondary boarding school, Hermione took five elective classes,” the researchers wrote in the study.
As life2vec evolved, they wrote, it became possible to construct “the life trajectory of an individual human being.”
“The whole story of a person’s life can, in some sense, be thought of as a giant long text that describes the many things that can happen to that person,” said the author of the paper, Networks and Complexity. said Sune Lehmann, a professor of science. The Technical University of Denmark stated: Tohoku Global News, university news site. Mr. Lehman previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University. Her collaborator, Tina Eliassi-Rad, is a professor of computer science at a university in Boston.
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Accurately predict death 78% of the time
Ultimately, the AI construct was able to accurately predict deaths by 2020 about 78% of the time, the researchers said in their report.
None of the study participants were told a prediction of their own death.
“That’s very irresponsible,” Lehman said. new york post
Factors associated with earlier death include having a mental health diagnosis, being male, and being in a skilled occupation. Science Times reported. Having a leadership role at work and having a higher income were associated with longevity.
Lehman told the Post that the program could predict international moves and decisions. “This model can predict almost anything,” he said.
When will I be able to connect my data to the Destiny Calculator?
It’s not possible right away. To protect the privacy of those whose information is used, the program and its data are not publicly available.
“We are actively working on ways to share some of our results more openly, but this requires further research to be conducted in a way that guarantees the privacy of the research subjects,” Lehman said. told the Daily Mail.
And that predictive power may not be applicable outside Denmark, Eliassi Rudd said. Tohoku Global News. “These kinds of tools kind of look at societies, but they don’t look at all societies,” she says. “Whether this can be done in America is another story.”
In any case, Eliassi Rudd said tools like life2vec should be used to track societal trends rather than predict individual outcomes.
“Even though we are using the predictions to assess how good these models are, this tool should not be used to predict real people,” she told the university’s news site. . A real human being has a heart and a mind.
Lehman told the university news site that he hopes the project will shed light on the development of AI and what to expect.
“I don’t have those answers, but now is the time to start a dialogue, because what we do know is that detailed predictions about human lives are already being made.” he said. . ”
Difficult decisions await. Do you want to know when and why you will die?
Professor Art Caplan, founder and professor of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, said the involvement of AI in death prediction is “the beginning of a very complex journey.” Other physical and medical characteristics are also predictive, and the insurance business is built on predictions. “What’s unique[here]is that we’re combining information from social employment and public records with health information to make predictions, and we haven’t met anyone in the study,” he said.
Caplan says it’s “inevitable” that consumers will have access to information about their predictions. “Let’s call it ‘prediction of death,’ and there’s going to be a lot of fights over access by third parties,” he said.
There are even bigger problems ahead. “These algorithms are starting to take things away from us that we don’t normally know about,” Caplan said. “While this has its positive aspects, potentially preventing death, it also carries the existential threat of removing all the unknown from your life, which is not necessarily a good thing.”
Follow Mike Snyder on X and Threads: @mikesnider & mike snyder.
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