Could an AI ‘death calculator’ actually be a good thing?

OUR lives, like stories, follow narrative arcs. Each one unfolds uniquely in chapters bearing familiar headings: school, career, moving home, injury, illness. Each storyline, or life, has a beginning, a middle and an unpredictable end. 

Now, according to scientists, each life story is the chronicle of a death foretold. By using Denmark’s registry data, which contains a wealth of day-to-day information on education, salary, job, working hours, housing and doctor visits, academics have developed an algorithm that can predict a person’s life course, including premature death, in much the same way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can predict sentences. The algorithm outperformed other predictive models, including actuarial tables used by the insurance industry.

That our complex existences can be parsed like scraps of text is both exhilarating and disconcerting. While we know that a generous income correlates with longer life expectancy, linking vast amounts of different data could unmask other ways in which social factors affect health. That could inform policymakers seeking to improve our odds of living longer, healthier lives.