Does knowing the year of your death allow you to live more intensely? A question that has not been answered until now, but that could well change. A Danish and American artificial intelligence, called Life2vec, prides itself on being able to calculate the age of death of a person based on a certain amount of data. Information on lifestyle, diet, sleep, health problems, but also education, income and place of residence is aggregated to calculate a year of potential death. This study carried out from 2008 to 2016 on around two million Danes revealed that the AI was correct in almost 80% of cases when it predicted the death of a person based on these criteria, reports BFM Business in particular on January 4, 2024. For the moment, this cutting-edge technology is reserved for researchers. The results of the study were also published in December 2023 in the scientific journal Nature Computational Science.
Forecasts that raise numerous ethical issues
Predicting a person’s expected date of death can potentially be an advantage in a medical setting, both to prevent patient illnesses and to make them aware of how their lifestyle impacts their health. However, this can also give rise to numerous abuses. Insurers or banks could request access to this data to decide on an insurance contract or the number of years to repay a loan, for example.
To protect against these rather dystopian excesses which risk arriving sooner than expected, legislating is essential. Invited to the microphone of France Inter, one of the researchers of the study, Sune Lehmann Jorgensen, declared: “We want to raise awareness of what is possible, this should not be done behind a closed door in Silicon Valley, but publicly, so that we can question how to legislate.”