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Researchers in Denmark are using artificial intelligence and data from millions of people to predict the stages of an individual's life from beginning to end, with the goal of raising awareness of the technology's capabilities and risks. The creators of life2vec wish to investigate patterns and links that so-called deep-learning programs might reveal in order to forecast a wide range of health or social "life-events". "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 (DTU) and one of the authors of a study recently published in the journal Nature Computational Science, told AFP. HT launches Crick-it, a one stop destination to catch Cricket, anytime, anywhere. Explore now! For Lehmann, the possibilities are endless. She told AFP, "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. (Also Read: Bengaluru water management body brings in AI, IoT technologies to manage borewells amid crisis: Report) The algorithm follows an approach comparable to ChatGPT, but instead examines variables that affect life, such as birth, education, social benefits, and even work schedules. 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". "From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the paediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on," Lehmann said to AFP. However, the program's revelation sparked accusations of a new "death calculator," with some fake websites duping individuals with offers to utilise the AI system for a life expectancy forecast, frequently in exchange for inputting personal data. The researchers asserted that the program is confidential and not available on the internet or to the larger scientific community for the time being. The life2vec model is based on anonymised data from around six million Danes provided by the official Statistics Denmark agency. Life outcomes can be predicted till the last breath by analysing sequences of occurrences. When it comes to predicting death, the algorithm is right in 78% of cases; when it comes to predicting if a person would relocate to another city or country, it is correct in 73% of cases. (Also Read: Pakistani artist imagines how Disney princesses in 1950s South Asia would look like with AI. Seen them yet?) "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. The model can do that really well, better than any other algorithm that we could find," Lehmann said to AFP. According to the researchers, focusing on this age group -- where deaths are typically rare -- allows them to test the algorithm's reliability. However, the instrument is not yet ready for use outside of a research environment. "For now, it's a research project where we're exploring what's possible and what's not possible," Lehmann said. He and his colleagues also want to explore long-term outcomes, as well as the impact of social connections have on life and health. For the researchers, the study serves as a scientific counterweight to huge technology companies' significant investments in AI algorithms. "They can also build models like this, but they're not making them public. They're not talking about them," Lehmann said. "They're just building them to, hopefully for now, sell you more advertisements, or sell more advertisements and sell you more products." He said it was "important to have an open and public counterpoint to begin to understand what can even happen with data like this". Pernille Tranberg, a Danish data ethics expert, told AFP that this was especially true because similar algorithms were already being used by businesses such as insurance companies. "They probably put you into groups and say: 'Okay, 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. When it comes to predicting our own demise, some developers have already tried to make such algorithms commercial. "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."