Foresight From predictions of AI treating humans like animals to repeated claims of algorithmic sentience, we thought we’d heard it all this year — until this new research about a purported death-predicting AI model dropped. In a new paper published in the journal Nature Computational Science, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) claim they’ve devised an AI model that can supposedly predict the outcomes of peoples’ lives, including the rough date of when they’re going to kick the bucket. “We used the model to address the fundamental question: to what extent can we predict events in your future based on conditions and events in your past?” DTU professor and paper author Sune Lehmann said in the school’s press release about the research. Using health and labor data on Denmark’s population of about six million people, Lehmann and her team built “life2vec,” a so-called “transformer model” that can translate one form of input into a different output via context clues. In the case of life2vec, the initial inputs are things like time and location of birth, education, health status, occupation, and salary — and the outputs supposedly predict everything from “early mortality” to “personality nuances,” as the study explains. “What’s exciting is to consider human life as a long sequence of events,” Lehmann said in the press release, “similar to how a sentence in a language consists of a series of words.” Ethical Implications Although that’s a strange way to describe it, the data scientist does make a good point:…Scientists Say Their New AI Can Predict When You’re Going to Die