Kongenslingby, Denmark:
Researchers in Denmark are using artificial intelligence and data from millions of people to help predict various stages of a person’s life until the end, hoping to raise awareness of the power of the technology and its dangers.
Life2vec’s creators stay away from any morbid obsession and instead hope to explore the patterns and relationships that so-called deep learning programs can discover to predict a wide range of health or social “life events.”
“This is a very general framework for predicting human life. As long as you have training data, it can predict anything.” Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and one of the authors of a recent study published in the journal Nature says Sune Lehmann. The journal Nature Computational Science told AFP.
For Lyman, the possibilities are endless.
“It can predict health outcomes. So it can predict fertility or obesity, or you can predict who’s going to get cancer or who’s not going to get cancer. But it can also predict whether you’re going to make a lot of money,” he said.
The algorithm uses a similar process to ChatGPT, but it analyzes life-affecting variables such as birth, education, social benefits and even work schedules.
The team is experimenting with innovative techniques that would enable language-processing algorithms to “examine the evolution and predictability of human life based on detailed sequences of events.”
“From one perspective, life is just a sequence of events: people are born, go to the pediatrician, start school, move to a new place, get married, and so on,” Lyman said.
However, revelations of the program soon sparked talk of a new “death calculator”, with fraudulent websites tricking people into using the AI program to make life expectancy predictions – often in exchange for submitting personal data.
The researchers insist the software is proprietary and not currently available on the internet or the wider research community.
Six million data
The life2vec model is based on anonymous data collected by Denmark’s official statistics agency on approximately 6 million Danes.
By analyzing the sequence of events, it is possible to predict the outcome of life up to the last breath.
When it came to predicting death, the algorithm was correct 78% of the time; when predicting whether a person would move to another city or country, it was correct 73% of the time.
“We focused on early mortality. So we took a very young cohort, between 35 and 65 years old. We then tried to predict whether a person would die next based on an eight-year period from 2008 to 2016 died within four years,” Lyman said.
“This model does that very well, better than any other algorithm we could find,” he said.
The researchers said focusing on this age group, where deaths are often few and far between, allowed them to verify the reliability of their algorithm.
However, the tool is not yet ready for use outside of research settings.
“Right now, this is a research project, and we’re exploring what’s possible and what’s not possible,” Lehmann said.
He and his colleagues also want to explore long-term outcomes and the impact of social relationships on life and health.
“Public Counterpoint”
For researchers, the project provides a scientific counterweight to the massive investment in artificial intelligence algorithms by big tech companies.
“They could also build models like this, but they wouldn’t make them public. They wouldn’t talk about them,” Lyman said.
“They just want to be able to sell you more ads now, or sell you more products while selling more ads.”
“It’s important to have an open and public counterpoint to begin to understand what might be happening with data like this,” he said.
Pernille Tranberg, a Danish data ethics expert, told AFP that this is especially true because similar algorithms are already used by companies such as insurance companies.
“They might put you into groups and say, ‘Well, you have a chronic disease and the risk is this and this,'” Tranberg said.
“It can be used against us to discriminate against us so that you have to pay higher insurance premiums, or you can’t get a loan from a bank, or you can’t get public health care because you’re going to die anyway,” she said.
When it comes to predicting our own demise, some developers are already trying to commercialize such algorithms.
“On the Internet, we’ve seen prediction clocks that show how old we will live,” Tranberg said. “Some of them are simply not reliable.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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