19 December 2023 , 23:02
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A “death bot” has been created that is unerringly accurate in telling you when you will die.
Scientists have used artificial intelligence to work out how long a person is likely to live using data. Information such as health, education, job and income are all taken into consideration.
The researchers at the Technical University of Denmark said that the robot has a 79% accuracy rate when going through the data of six million people between 2008 and 2020. The machine carefully considers "human life as a long sequence of events similar to how a sentence in a language consists of a series of words," stated the creators of the death bot.
Researcher Sune Lehmann Jorgensen said: "We used the model to address to what extent can we predict events in your future based on conditions and events in your past." Specifically, the Life2vec model designed by the researchers uses similar technology as that in AI apps like ChatGPT where a series of words are taken and then which is statistically most likely to come next. With Life2vec the statistics of events are considered and which are likely to follow.
The death bot was trained using the data up to 2016 and then tested on the next four years up to 2020 where there was a group of people aged 35 to 65 with half of those having died in that period. The AI was proved to be 11% more accurate than other existing models that are currently being used by life insurance policies in being able to predict those who had died.
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It is hoped that artificial intelligence can be used in predicting health problems but the researchers also realised the negative impact of being able to predict when people are going to die for insurance purposes.
Speaking to the New Scientist Mr Jorgensen said: “Clearly, our model should not be used by an insurance company, because the whole idea of insurance is that, by sharing the lack of knowledge of who is going to be the unlucky person struck by some incident, or death, or losing your backpack, we can kind of share this burden.”
Worryingly, though, he believes that it is already likely that big tech companies are already using a similar type of technology to examine tonnes of data and make predictions about us.