AI can now take a tonne of information about you, and tell you with scary accuracy when you will cease to exist. Yikes! Yep we have now entered a time in the human timeline that AI can predict when you will die.
This is according to a new study by boffins at the University of Copenhagen, who worked with other boffins at Northeastern University in the U.S.
The research studied 6 million Danes. The number-crunching folk got an AI to look at registry data including where people live, how educated they were, their income and working conditions, and how healthy they were. When these stats were added all together in a stew of information, the boffins could predict really big events in the lives of the people they studied. It could even predict things like personality.
Unalive predictions
Pundits on TikTok and other platforms have been claiming to be able to predict when you die by looking at several health markers. But a lot of this has been based on opinion. A more well-known person in this type of content is biologist and “bio hacker” (as he calls himself) Gary Brecka.
However, AIs can and do look at huge amounts of data. Who would you trust, an AI or a human? It is a question we all could be asking ourselves very soon.
AI can predict when you die
The AI used in the study is called Life2vec, and the researchers say it is a ‘transformer’ model. It could, they say, estimate the time of death of anyone in the study.
Professor Sune Lehmann, author of the study, says, “Scientifically, what is exciting for us is not so much the prediction itself, but the aspects of data that enable the model to provide such precise answers.”
Predictions of time of death
When predicting death time, interestingly, Life2vec answers matched other results garnered from the social sciences which have been in use for some time.
Depressingly, the AI, like in social sciences, predicted that people in leadership positions or those flushed with cash were more likely to live longer.
But… bad news for men, anyone with a mental illness or even those who are “skilled”… these people have a higher risk of tapping out early.
AI can predict when you die: Ethical stuff
Do we all need to be on alert for big huge insurance companies that get hold of this information? Imagine having to pay a higher premium because you have a skill rather than a uni degree? Yikes!
Unfortunately they already have their own methods of working such things out.
Professor Lehmann says, “Similar technologies for predicting life events and human behaviour are already used today inside tech companies that, for example, track our behaviour on social networks, profile us extremely accurately, and use these profiles to predict our behaviour and influence us. This discussion needs to be part of the democratic conversation so that we consider where technology is taking us and whether this is a development we want.”
Ew no, we don’t want that. Stop the ride we want to get off!
