A team of scientists in Denmark and the United States of America have built a machine that is capable of predicting how humans will live and when they will die.
According to the UK Daily Mail, the model called ‘life2vec’ is accurate about 78 percent of the time, and this puts it on par with other algorithms designed to predict similar human life outcomes.
Unlike other models, however, ‘life2vec’ works like a chatbot, using existing details of a particular human to predict what happens to them next.
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In building the machine, the scientists trained a machine-learning algorithm on a massive pool of Danish data. They fed it all sorts of information on over six million real people, including income, profession, place of residence, injuries and pregnancy history.
The model is capable of predicting a person’s likelihood of dying early, or his or her income over a certain lifespan.
From the way the machine works, being male, having a mental health diagnosis and being in a skilled profession are some of the factors that can lead to early death.
Things linked to a long life include a higher income or being in a leadership role.
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The machine can be asked simple questions like “Death within four years?” for a certain person. The model was trained on data from 2008 to 2016.
Based on a population data, ‘life2vec’ correctly predicted who had died by 2020 more than three-quarters of the time.
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