Imagine if you could know your future by just typing a few words. What if an artificial intelligence (AI) system could tell you how long you will live, what kind of personality you have, or whether you will move to another country? Sounds like science fiction, right? But a new study by researchers from Denmark and the US suggests that this is not so far-fetched.
The study, published in the journal Nature Computational Science, describes an AI system called Life2vec, which can predict major human life events, including death, based on large-scale data. The system is inspired by ChatGPT, a popular AI chatbot that can generate realistic text conversations. ChatGPT was trained on massive amounts of internet data, such as web pages, Wikipedia articles, and books. Life2vec, on the other hand, was trained on a massive dataset containing detailed information about six million Danish residents, spanning decades.
The dataset, which was anonymized and aggregated to protect privacy, included data from work and health databases, such as income, education, occupation, marital status, hospital visits, prescriptions, and causes of death. The researchers used this data to create a “life course” for each individual, which is a sequence of events that describe their life history. For example, a life course could look like this: born, start school, graduate, get married, have children, divorce, retire, die.
The researchers then fed these life courses to Life2vec, which learned to extract patterns and correlations from them. The system can then use these patterns to predict the next event in a given life course, or to fill in the missing events in an incomplete life course. For instance, given the partial life course: born, start school, graduate, get married, have children, Life2vec can predict that the next event is divorce, or that the missing event between graduate and get married is start work.
The researchers tested Life2vec’s predictions on various aspects of human life, such as personality, migration, and mortality. They found that the system can accurately assess whether a person is extroverted or introverted, based on their life course. They also found that the system can predict whether a person will emigrate to another country, and which country they will choose. Moreover, they found that the system can estimate how long a person will live, and what will be the cause of their death.
The researchers claim that their study is the first to show that AI can predict human life events, including death, using large-scale data. They say that their system could have many applications, such as providing personalized recommendations, interventions, and services to people, based on their life course. However, they also acknowledge that their system raises ethical and social issues, such as privacy, fairness, and accountability. They caution that their system should not be used for decision-making that could affect people’s lives, such as insurance, employment, or health care.
The study also highlights the potential and limitations of AI, which can learn from data, but cannot understand the meaning or context behind it. As the researchers write, “Life2vec is not a crystal ball, but rather a powerful tool for exploring and understanding human life courses.”