AI Is Trying to Predict Your Death. It's Not as Scary as It Sounds.
Although you have to admit, “death calculators” sound cooler than actuarial tables.
Making an educated guess.
Photographer: FPG/Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWhen headlines recently proclaimed that artificial intelligence can be used to create a “death calculator” that predicts the day you’ll die, it sounded like something from a terrifying science fiction story. The reaction showed how readily people believe that AI has magical fortune-telling powers.
The reality was not as far-fetched. The paper that spawned the fracas, in the journal Nature Computational Science, did involve using AI to predict death, but it wasn’t very precise. Using both economic and health data on thousands of people in Denmark, an AI-based system was able to predict with about 78% accuracy which people would die within the next four years.