A group of Danish and American social scientists announced that with artificial intelligence and a huge data set, they were able to predict the likelihood of a person’s death within the next four years with startling accuracy. Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives, this calculator can also predict job, income, and other information about people. This calculator may seem fake, but with recent studies and tests, this AI calculator can really be a predictor of the future.
What is This Calculator?
The project started from a basic observation about artificial intelligence. In large language models, words are transformed into numeric tokens. Then the tokens were examined in impossibly large combinations to find their relationships. Just like how humans use grammar and logic to sort words, AI use these tokens to function and do specific jobs. But the sheer size of a neural network from these computers allow these machines to find patterns and correlations among the tokens that most humans could never spot. But instead of text, these researchers first tried to tokenize reams of data about everyday life. To exclude recent events such as the pandemic and ensure they could determine final outcomes, they relied on data recorded from 2008 to 2015. After the Foundation of Statistics Denmark, a state agency established in to keep track of everything that might happen to a Dane, agreed to bring data forward, the conversion into tokens began
At first the model saw only small strings of figures. But after months of work, the model started to find patterns. The AI soon had trained itself to recognize concepts such as health and education and income status. Then it made distinctions within each concept, sorting broken bones and various types of cancer by lethality. It taught itself how to put individual lives into the 100 salary quantiles used by Statistics Denmark and finally, these researchers had accomplished their dreams.
What are the Outcomes of This Calculator?
By excluding people under age 35 and over 65 from the model, the researchers were able to predict mortality within the data with rapid accuracy. The one-worded explanation was cancer. These predictions aren’t guesses as the data tells someone that their body is under attack. Of course there are deaths by misadventure, accident and chronic disease, but an actuary can produce similar results as the model without the benefit of AI.
Related Stories:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/15/artificial-intelligence-death-calculator/
https://www.news5cleveland.com/ai-death-calculator-can-predict-when-you-ll-die-with-eery-accuracy
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