What is Life2vec?
AI Death Calculator
Scientists have invented Life2vec, an AI death calculator that can predict with 78% accuracy
when an individual might die.
Researchers have developed a new AI tool called Life2vec, which claims to forecast the trajectory of your life by analyzing data from Danish health and demographic records of six million individuals.
The model, created by scientists in Denmark and the US, incorporates information from health, social, and environmental factors, utilizing data extracted from Danish health and demographic records.
Life2vec not only claims to predict the timing of your death but also aims to estimate your financial status when that time comes. It relies on details such as income, profession, and medical records to make predictions about your life expectancy and financial circumstances.
How accurate is the death calculator?
Supposedly, the death calculator works to 78 percent accuracy, using previous research to determine the length of life.
For example, factors that are known to contribute to longer or shorter lifespans, such as smoking, exercise habits, gender, or poor mental health, are all taken into account. Even characteristics like having higher incomes and working in leadership roles can lead to a longer life.
Every factor like this is given a code, such as S52 for a broken forearm or IND4726 for working in a tobacco shop. The Danish team behind the tool converted those codes into words that are then used, to sum up people’s lives in data-rich sentences that aid the overall predictions.
How can I try it out?
So far, Life2vec has been tested on a group of people aged between 35 and 65, half of whom died between 2016 and 2020.
However, it’s not yet open to the public, with stipulations that it’s only been trained on people in Denmark and that the data from the tool shouldn’t be used in certain situations.
“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,” Professor Jørgensen, leader of the Life2vec team, told Metro.
Not Publicly Available
To protect the information of the people behind the system training, the algorithm is not available to the public. Lehmann explains that they are working to find ways to share results more openly. However, further research is necessary for this to be done in a manner that can guarantee that the people involved in the study will have protected privacy.
Should the model be made available to the general public, privacy laws in Denmark will restrict the use of life2vec for making decisions about people, such as hiring decisions or making insurance policies.