Kongens Lyngby, Denmark—Researchers in Denmark are harnessing artificial intelligence and data from millions of people to help anticipate the stages of an individual’s life all the way to the end, hoping to raise awareness of the technology’s power, and its perils.
The team is trying to adapt the innovations that enabled language-processing algorithms to “examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences.” The researchers insist the software is private and unavailable on the internet or to the wider research community for now.The basis for the life2vec model is the anonymized data of around six million Danes, collected by the official Statistics Denmark agency.
“We look at early mortality. So, we take a very young cohort between 35 and 65. Then we try to predict, based on an eight-year period from 2008 to 2016, if a person dies in the subsequent four years,” Lehmann said.According to the researchers, focusing on this age bracket—where deaths are usually few and far between—allows them to verify the algorithm’s reliability.“For now, it’s a research project where we’re exploring what’s possible and what’s not possible,” Lehmann said.
“They’re just building them to, hopefully for now, sell you more advertisements, or sell more advertisements and sell you more products.” “They probably put you into groups and say: ‘Okay, you have a chronic disease, the risk is this and this,’” Tranberg said.