Scientists have created an artificial intelligence-driven calculator that can reportedly forecast the date of someone’s future death with remarkable accuracy.
Called “life2vec,” the calculator reportedly relies on the same technology undergirding ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot.
The calculator was unveiled in a recently published study titled “Using sequence of life-events to predict human lives.”
“We use the technology behind ChatGPT (something called transformer models) to analyze human lives by representing each person as the sequence of events that happens in their life,” lead study author Sune Lehmann told the New York Post.
A groundbreaking new ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence system trained with the life stories of over a million people is highly accurate in predicting the lives of individuals as well as their risk of early death, according to a new study. This AI system, named “life2vec,”… pic.twitter.com/pbKIXRBiZ2 — The Tatva (@thetatvaindia) December 21, 2023
Basically, the bot analyzes both factors of one’s life (income, profession, residence, etc.) and the events of one’s past and uses them to predict the individual’s total lifespan with an accuracy of 78 percent.
“We use the fact that in a certain sense, human lives share a similarity with language,” Lehmann explained. “Just like words follow each other in sentences, events follow each other in human lives.”
“This model can predict almost anything. We predicted death because it’s something people have worked on for many years (for example, insurance companies), so we had a good sense of what was possible,” he continued.
According to the Post, Lehmann’s study group “examined a heterogeneous subject population of 6 million Danish people, who varied in sex and age, between 2008 and 2020,” and then used “life2vec” to predict who’d live for at least four years past Jan. 1st, 2016.
“The scale of our dataset allows us to construct sequence-level representations of individual human life trajectories, which detail how each person moves through time,” the study reads.
“We can observe how individual lives evolve in a space of diverse event types (information about a heart attack is mixed with salary increases or information about moving from an urban to a rural area),” it continues.
An AI that can predict Life expectancy?? Life2Vec is a life changing AI being developed. Here’s how it helps us: 1️⃣ Understand and relate to human experiences on a deeper level. 2️⃣ Enhance mental well-being by offering personalized insights and support. 3️⃣ Empower… pic.twitter.com/JqTLSdBsjw — Wantace (@WantaceAI) December 21, 2023
After examining the “subject population,” the researchers then fed that data to “life2vec” the way they would if virtual-chatting with a doctor: By typing “in September 2012, Francisco received 20,000 Danish kroner as a guard at a castle in Elsinore” or “during her third year at secondary boarding school, Hermione followed five elective classes.”
The Post notes that they then “assigned different digital tokens to each piece of data, which were all quite specifically categorized.”
“For instance, a forearm fracture is represented as S52; working in a tobacco shop is coded as IND4726, income is represented by 100 different digital tokens; and ‘postpartum hemorrhage’ is O72,” the Post’s reporting continues.
Using all this data “life2vec” then predicted who’d be dead by 2020 with over 75 percent accuracy and also determined what factors most likely contribute to death. These factors include being a man, suffering from a mental health issue, being in a skilled profession, earning a lower income, and being single.
The only catch is that the study participants weren’t told their expected date of death.
“That would be very irresponsible,” Lehmann said. “But we can still learn from [‘life2vec’] what the factors are that might help you live longer. We haven’t gone deep with this, but that’s another important application of the model.”
According to the Post, “The bot is not currently available to the general public or corporations,” and “upon its mass rollout — should it ever become open for mainstream use — the prober says the AI likely won’t be used to apprise specific individuals in instances like writing insurance policies or making hiring decisions.”
Responding to word of the chatbot death predictor, social media users were full of cynicism, disbelief, mockery, and skepticism, in addition to some jokes.
Look:
Pointless. You can literally die tomorrow. — Fire&Ice (@FireIce845018) December 20, 2023
Ai death calculator predicts when you die? Hell nah I’m good on that shit — bizzle (@Jae_bizzle) December 21, 2023
Mine gave me 24 hours, but I upgraded the app to ‘no advertising’ and it gave me another 6 months. — JD (@JD__B) December 20, 2023
I’m going to need an explanation as to how this is different than actuary tables. People are calling everything AI now just so they make the news. — Wade Dolphin (@wade_dolphin) December 20, 2023
What a crock of shit lol. The technology has been around less than a year and they’re claiming it has close to an 80% accuracy rate. How could you possibly measure something like that in such little time? pic.twitter.com/Fibre97sIz — rate limit exceeded (@calebisntfunny) December 20, 2023