Caution for Users of AI ‘Death Calculator

Once upon a time, anyone wondering how long they might live would look at their parents and other ancestors, guess whether all those terrible things in the news about this or that vice are really as deadly as they say, and come up with a number that was as good a guess as any.

But in the 21st century, that’s the job of technology, where what’s called a “Death Calculator” has been created by Danish researchers so that artificial intelligence can do all that guessing for us.

And since this is the 21st century, and fooling the gullible online is the most common human impulse left before the robots do that for us as well, there are now copycat apps that have drawn the ire of the Danish folks at Life2vec, who spent years perfecting their AI gizmo, according to Metro.

Scammers, they warn, “have nothing to do with us and our work. So be careful.”

The researchers who came up with the rather morbid use for technology say that the data behind the real thing is not accessible through the internet and is stored at Statistics Denmark.

“We are aware of Life2vec social media accounts, and there is at least one fraudulent website. We are not affiliated with these or any other entities that claim to use our technology,” the AI creators said.

The “death calculator” is a data-driven model that throws all the variables of life into an algorithm that gets it right about 78 percent of the time, according to an Agence France-Presse report posted on Science Alert.

“It’s a very general framework for making predictions about human lives. It can predict anything where you have training data,” Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark and one of the authors of a study about the algorithm said.

“It could predict health outcomes. So it could predict fertility or obesity, or you could maybe predict who will get cancer or who doesn’t get cancer. But it could also predict if you’re going to make a lot of money,” he said.

The algorithm is based on the process used to develop ChatGPT, but instead of words, its variables are things such as birth, education, social benefits or even work schedules.

“From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the pediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on,” Lehmann said, noting that the goal of the work is to “examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences.”

“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.

“The model can do that really well, better than any other algorithm that we could find,” he said.

Lehmann said the research is not for sale.

“For now, it’s a research project where we’re exploring what’s possible and what’s not possible,” Lehmann said, noting that the project is trying to explore how social connections impact life.

Pernille Tranberg, a Danish data ethics expert, said insurance companies make these calculations now.

“They probably put you into groups and say: ‘OK, you have a chronic disease, the risk is this and this’,” Tranberg said.

“It can be used against us to discriminate us so that you will have to pay a higher insurance premium, or you can’t get a loan from the bank, or you can’t get public health care because you’re going to die anyway,” she said.

Tranberg also offered the novel thought that people wandering the internet wondering about their lifespan might not always believe what they find there.

“On the web, we’re already seeing prediction clocks, which show how old we’re going to get,” Tranberg said. “Some of them aren’t at all reliable.”