ARTIFICIAL intelligence researchers have developed a language model that can predict the death of a person.
The latest algorithm uses four data sets to forest the outcomes and boasts 78 per cent accuracy, putting it on par with similar models developed to foresee future life events.
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What is the AI death calculator?
The AI death calculator is based on a language model called life2vec developed by scientists from Denmark and the US.
Developers trained the language model with data from six million Danish citizens that ranged from 2008 to 2020.
The team – which has not yet made the calculator available to the general public – tested Life2vec on a group of people aged between 35 and 65, half of whom died between 2016 and 2020.
They found that its predictions were 11 per cent more accurate than that of any other existing AI language model capable of predicting future life events.
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“What’s exciting is to consider human life as a long sequence of events, similar to how a sentence in a language consists of a series of words,” study first author Sune Lehman from DTU said.
“This is usually the type of task for which transformer models in AI are used, but in our experiments, we use them to analyze what we call life sequences, i.e., events that have happened in human life.”
She continued: “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.
“They’re likely being used on us already by big tech companies that have tonnes of data about us, and they’re using it to make predictions about us.”
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How does the AI death calculator work?
To understand the future through machine learning, AI uses vast sets of data from the past to analyse them and find patterns – something that is employed by every language model trained to foresee upcoming vents.
In the case of the AI death calculator, life2vec uses several factors in a person’s life to build up a profile of them.
This can range from categories like job and income, marital status, to medical records, and even family history
These categories are then transformed into codes for the model to feed the data and understand it.
Once it starts studying the data, it tries to recognise patterns in the past and tries to predict future events based on them – which in this case is the death of a person.
What has the AI death calculator predicted?
According to the New York Post, life2vec could almost perfectly predict who died by 2020 more than three-quarters of the time.
While the AI bot is still not available in the public domain, Lehmann told the media house it can be deployed to learn “what factors might help you to live longer”.
No study participants who were part of the experiment were given their death predictions.
What does P(doom) mean?
A word that is buzzing around sweeping the world of tech is P(doom) which stands for “probability of doom”.
Much like a mathematical equation, the term is constructed to signal a person’s opinion about the probability of AI destroying the real world.
P(doom) operates in range and has a score out of 100.
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A person with a higher P(doom), say 85, believes that artificial intelligence, given its exponential growth, is more likely to doom the world in no time.
Similarly, someone with a score of 15 thinks that the AI revolution is less likely to take over the world, and is said to be lower P(doom).
