AI can now predict how successful you'll be in life
AI has already demonstrated its capabilities to predict some pretty serious things, from medical diagnoses to the day you will leave Earth.
Some things are best left unknown, I think.
But what if you could catch a glimpse of the future to see how successful you will be? AI can pull through on this too.
Researchers in Denmark developed life2vec to help them explore patterns from deep-learning programmes, predicting a range of health and social 'life events'.
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The algorithm is similar to that of ChatGPT but instead of unverified sources, this analyses true life-impacting factors such as birth, education, and social benefits.
Using anonymised data from around six million Danes, collected by the Official Statistics Denmark agency, the AI program analysed sequences of events.
'From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the paediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on.' said Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, and one of the study's authors.
The results?
The algorithm predicts death with 78% accuracy.
On a much lighter note, when predicting if a person will move to another city or country, it is correct in 73% of cases.
'It's a very general framework for making predictions about human lives. It can predict anything where you have training data,' Lehmann continued.
Overall, Lehmann sees big potential for the AI model, saying: 'It could predict health outcomes. So it could predict fertility or obesity, or you could maybe predict who will get cancer or who doesn't get cancer. But it could also predict if you're going to make a lot of money.'
While it might be tempting to use this tool to choose when to stay indoors or which job offer to accept, don't rush.
The tool is strictly for private use with zero public access.
'For now, it's a research project where we're exploring what's possible and what's not possible,' Lehmann added.
However, false sites have been created on the back of this project advertising themselves as a 'death calculator', typically in exchange for personal information.
Pernille Tranberg, a Danish data ethics expert, pointed out that similar algorithms have been used by businesses such as insurance companies.
'On the web, we're already seeing prediction clocks, which show how old we're going to get. Some of them aren't at all reliable,' Tranberg cautioned.