Could an AI ‘death calculator’ be a good thing?
A new Danish algorithm exploits the fact that both language and life are sequences, and outperforms other predictive models
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Now, according to scientists, each life story is the chronicle of a death foretold.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY
Anjana Ahuja
Our lives, like stories, follow narrative arcs. Each one unfolds uniquely in chapters bearing familiar headings: school, career, moving home, injury, illness. Each storyline, or life, has a beginning, a middle and an unpredictable end.
Now, according to scientists, each life story is the chronicle of a death foretold. By using Denmark’s registry data, which contains a wealth of day-to-day information on education, salary, job, working hours, housing and doctor visits, academics have developed an algorithm that can predict a person’s life course, including premature death, in much the same way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can predict sentences.
